Solution of Economic Load Dispatch using real coded Hybrid Stochastic Search

This paper presents the design and application of a new real coded Hybrid S tochastic Search (HSS) heuristic to the Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) proble m in power systems. The heuristic incorporates Simulated Annealing (SA) in the selection process of Genetic Algorithm (GA). The HSS heuristic has been designed with the genetic operator called the Blend crossover to provide a better search capability. The heuristic is quite general and various aspec ts like valve point discontinuities, non-monotonically increasing costs, em ission control and transmission losses, etc. are easily incorporated as per requirement. Extensive testing has been carried out on standard test syste ms. The performance and the results obtained by this heuristic have been co mpared with those reported in the literature. These results indicate that t he new HSS heuristic converges to better solutions much more rapidly than t he other GA and SA heuristics and is, therefore, applicable to large real l ife power systems. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.