Power economic dispatch using water cycle algorithm (T-0400) (MFN 4217)

Abstract

Modern living standards, industrial development and population escalation has altered various aspects of traditional power industry. This changed situation has altered power generation practice due to concerns like rapidly increasing fuel cost, ever growing electricity demand, environmental pollution etc. Therefore, competition in electricity market has been increased to ensure provision of electricity to the consumers with highest quality at minimum cost. In power generation, the operational planning is a major activity which includes the superlative employment of the available energy resources subjected to various constraints. Economic dispatch (ED) is the extremely challenging part of power system operational planning and is defined as a complex constrained engineering optimization problem that aims to calculate power generation of the generating units in a power system for minimum generation cost, subject to constraints. Traditionally, Economic Dispatch (ED) has been expressed as a convex optimization problem solved with the help of conventional optimization techniques. The conventional techniques Include Equal Incremental Cost Criterion, Newton’s Method, Lambda Iteration Method, Linear Programming, Non-Linear Programming, Dynamic Programming etc. But economic dispatch in modern power systems is highly complex due to non-smooth (or non-convex) objective functions and various newly added constraints. The conventional optimization techniques are not capable in effectively solving this complex problem. In literature, various stochastic optimization techniques have been employed to solve non-convex economic dispatch problem and the research is being continued to achieve the best possible solution. This research presents implementation of Water Cycle Algorithm (WCA) on economic dispatch problem. WCA is a novel metaheuristic population based algorithm, recently introduced for solving constrained engineering optimization problems. In this research, WCA has been tested on various standard test systems and its effectiveness has been verified by comparing the simulation results with those of other algorithms in literature. Simulation results have been calculated using Matlab.