Economic load dispatch (ELD) problem is a quite important task in the operational planning of a power system, where fuel cost is minimized by allocating generation to the committed units subject to the constraints imposed. A small change in the formulation of objective function will come into picture with the introduction of valve point loading effects. In this paper an effective and reliable particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique is proposed for the economic load dispatch problem. The results have been demonstrated for Economic Load Dispatch of standard 3-generator and 10-generator systems with and without consideration of the transmission losses.

In this paper, an effective and reliable variant of particle swarm optimization with time-varying acceleration coefficients (PSO-TVAC) technique is proposed for the economic load dispatch problem considering valve-point loading effect. Main objective of the economic load dispatch (ELD) problem is to minimize the fuel cost by allocating the generation of the committed units subjected to the equality and inequality constraints. Equation of the economic dispatch objective function gets modified with the addition of a new parameter which represents the effect of valve-point loading. While exploring the use of PSO and its other variants to the economic dispatch problem, a number of research works have not considered the transmission losses properly. This paper represents the usefulness of the proposed PSO-TVAC algorithm to significantly reduce the fuel cost while taking into account the effect of transmission losses along with the non-convex characteristic due to valve loading. The results have been demonstrated for three-generator and ten-generator test systems.