Differential evolution for economic load dispatch problems

In this work, differential evolution (DE) algorithm was studied for solving economic load dispatch (ELD) problems in power systems. DE has proven to be effective in solving many real world constrained optimization problems in different domains. ELD problems are complex and nonlinear in nature with equality and inequality constraints and here special measures were taken to satisfy those. Five ELD problems of different characteristics were used to investigate the effectiveness of the proposal. Comparing with the other existing techniques, the current proposal was found better than, or at least comparable to, them considering the quality of the solution obtained. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.