A novel method to solve sustainable economic power loading dispatch problem

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to deal with the economic requirements of power system loading dispatch and reduce the fuel cost of generation units. In order to optimize the scheduling of power load, an improved chicken swarm optimization (ICSO) is proposed to be adopted, for solving economic load dispatch (ELD) problem. Design/methodology/approach The ICSO increased the self-foraging factor to the chicks whose activities were the highest. And the evolutionary operations of chicks capturing the rooster food were increased. Therefore, these helped the ICSO to jump out of the local extreme traps and obtain the global optimal solution. In this study, the generation capacity of the generation unit is regarded as a variable, and the fuel cost is regarded as the objective function. The particle swarm optimization (PSO), chicken swarm optimization (CSO), and ICSO were used to optimize the fuel cost of three different test systems. Findings The result showed that the convergence speed, global search ability, and total fuel cost of the ICSO were better than those of PSO and CSO under different test systems. The non-linearity of the input and output of the generating unit satisfied the equality constraints; the average ratio of the optimal solution obtained by PSO, CSO, and ICSO was 1:0.999994:0.999988. The result also presented the equality and inequality constraints; the average ratio of the optimal solution was 1:0.997200:0.996033. The third test system took the non-linearity of the input and output of the generating unit that satisfied both equality and inequality constraints; the average ratio was 1:0.995968:0.993564. Practical implications This study realizes the whole fuel cost minimization in which various types of intelligent algorithms have been applied to the field of load economic scheduling. With the continuous evolution of intelligent algorithms, they save a lot of fuel cost for the ELD problem. Originality/value The ICSO is applied to solve the ELD problem. The quality of the optimal solution and the convergence speed of ICSO are better than that of CSO and PSO. Compared with PSO and CSO, ICSO can dispatch the generator more reasonably, thus saving the fuel cost. This will help the power sector to achieve greater economic benefits. Hence, the ICSO has good performance and significant effectiveness in solving the ELD problem.