Environmental/economic power dispatch problem using multi-objective differential evolution algorithm

This paper presents a multi-objective differential evolution (MODE) algorithm for environmental/economic power dispatch (EED) problem. The EED problem is formulated as a nonlinear constrained multi-objective problem with competing and non-commensurable objectives of fuel cost, emission and system loss. The proposed MODE approach adopts an external elitist archive to retain non-dominated solutions found during the evolutionary process. In order to preserve the diversity of Pareto optimality, a crowding entropy diversity measure tactic is proposed. The crowding entropy strategy is able to measure the crowding degree of the solutions more accurately. In addition, fuzzy set theory is employed to extract the best compromise solution. Several optimization runs of the proposed approach have been carried out on the IEEE 30- and 118-bus test system. The results demonstrate the capability of the proposed MODE approach to generate well-distributed Pareto optimal non-dominated solutions of multi-objective EED problem. The comparison with reported results of other MOEAs reveals the superiority of the proposed MODE approach and confirms its potential for solving other power systems multi-objective optimization problems. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.