Economic Load Dispatch with Multiple Fuel Options and Valve Point Effect Using Cuckoo Search Algorithm with Different Distributions

Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA), a new meta-heuristic algorithm based on natural phenomenon of Cuckoo species and Levy flights random walk has been widely and successfully applied to several optimization problems so far. In the paper two modified versions of CSA, where new solutions are generated using two distributions including Gaussian and Cauchy distributions in addition to imposing bound by best solutions mechanism are proposed for solving economic load dispatch (ELD) problem with multiple fuel options. The advantages of CSA with Gaussian distribution (CSA-Gauss) and CSA with Cauchy distribution (CSA-Cauchy) over CSA with Levy distribution and other meta-heuristic are fewer parameters. The proposed CSA methods are tested on two systems with several load cases and obtained results are compared to other methods. The result comparisons have shown that the proposed methods are highly effective for solving ELD problem with multiple fuel options and/nor valve point effect.