Hybrid Differential Evolution and Gravitational Search Algorithm for Nonconvex Economic Dispatch

The hybrid differential evolution and gravitational search algorithm (DEGSA) to solve economic dispatch (ED) problems with non-convex cost functions is presented in this paper with various generator constraints in power systems. The proposed DEGSA method is an improved differential evolution method based on the gravitational search algorithm scheme. The DEGSA method has the flexible adjustment of the parameters to get a better optimal solution. Moreover, an effective constraint handling framework in the method is employed for properly handling equality and inequality constraints of the problems. The proposed DEGSA has been tested on three systems with 13, 15, 40 units and the obtained results from the DEGSA algorithm have been compared to those from other methods in the literature. The result comparison has indicated that the proposed DEGSA method is more effective than many other methods for obtaining better optimal solution for the test systems. Therefore, the proposed DEGSA is a very favorable method for solving the non-convex ED problems.