An enhanced cuckoo search algorithm based contingency constrained economic load dispatch for security enhancement

•Enhanced cuckoo search algorithm is proposed for CCELD problem.•Overload alleviation.•Contingency analysis is performed to obtain critical contingencies.•Generation rescheduling to minimize severity index with minimum fuel cost.

This paper propose a meta-heuristic algorithm known as the enhanced cuckoo search (ECS) algorithm for contingency constrained economic load dispatch (CCELD) in order to relieve transmission line overloading. The power system security assessment deals with finding out the secure and the insecure operating states, whereas the security enhancement deals with the necessary control action against overloads under contingency scenario. By generation rescheduling the overloaded lines can be relieved from the severity. In the proposed ECS algorithm, in order to improve the solution vectors, dynamically variable parameters namely the step size and the probability are incorporated instead of the fixed values of the parameters. The CCELD problem includes scheduling of generators to minimize the severity index with minimum fuel cost. A standard IEEE-30 bus system is considered to study the effectiveness of the proposed ECS algorithm for CCELD problem. Numerical results reveals that, for 100 iterations the proposed ECS algorithm out performs the other state-of-the-art algorithms, namely cuckoo search (CS), Bat algorithm (BA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm in obtaining the minimum fuel cost and the minimum severity index in minimum time. Thus, the proposed ECS algorithm is found to be efficient to obtain the solution of contingency constrained economic load dispatch problem.