Particle swarm intelligence based dynamic economic dispatch with daily load patterns including valve point effect

The main aim of a power engineer is to develop a highly reliable power supply system. The goal of a Dynamic Economic Load Dispatch (DELD) problem is to establish a generating schedule of power generating units corresponding to the most economical point of operation keeping the change in daily load patterns into considerations over a given time horizon. This also attempts to lower the operating cost and the fuel consumption. This research work makes a contribution in finding an optimal solution of DELD problem by using the proposed solution technique, based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique. PSO is used to find the optimum generation schedule for all the power generating units to supply power to the load at the minimum possible running cost and the fuel consumption, at the same time satisfying all the system constraints like: Valve point effect, Ramp rate limits and transmission losses. Th simulation is carried out on a system of 5 generating units over the time horizon of 24 Hours with the proposed PSO and the results are compared with the results obtained from other methodologies such as Simulated Annealing (SA), Differential Evolutionary (DE) and Heuristic Algorithm (HS).