AN ENHANCED HOPFIELD MODEL FOR ECONOMIC-DISPATCH CONSIDERING PROHIBITED ZONES

This paper presents an enhanced Hopfield model with a novel technique to resolve economic dispatch (ED) problems with prohibited operating z ones. The prohibited operating zones of units cause the ED problem to become a nonconvex optimization problem, consequently there are many l ocal minima embedded in the problem. By employing the proposed Hopfiel d model one can reach the global minimum for the nonconvex problem men tioned above. An energy function is defined in the model proposed. The model solution moves in the direction of decreasing energy and finall y searches out an optimal point with minimum energy. Applying the prop osed approach is demonstrated by a 15-unit system with 4 units having prohibited zones. In the solution process, the dispatching generation level of each unit gradually changes according to its incremental cost and approaches the optimal value meeting the equal-incremental-cost c riterion. From the results of the sample system study, the proposed me thod shows the advantage of having far less computational requirements than that of the conventional method. Hence, the proposed method is m ore suitable for real time application. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science S.A.