Hybrid biogeography-based optimization with brain storm optimization for non-convex dynamic economic dispatch with valve-point effects

Dynamic economic dispatch (DED), mathematically, is a typical highly complex nonlinear multivariable strongly coupled optimization problem with equality and inequality constraints, especially considering valve-point effects. In this paper, a hybrid method named BBOSB by combining biogeography-based optimization (BBO) with brain storm optimization (BSO) is proposed. BBO has good local exploitation ability due to its information sharing mechanism. But it is likely to suffer from premature convergence when dealing with complex multimodal problems. Quite the opposite, BSO possesses excellent global exploration ability owing to its grouping evolution strategy which, however, also can drag its global searching process. In such contexts, the hybrid BBOSB method is able to fully take advantages of both BBO and BSO to conquer premature convergence and to accelerate the global searching process simultaneously. The experimental and comparison results on four non-convex benchmark DED test cases with valve-point effects and a practical provincial power system of China comprehensively demonstrate that BBOSB is highly competitive and can be used as a promising alternative for DED problems. In addition, the effect of population size on the optimization performance is investigated as well.