Chaotic differential evolution methods for dynamic economic dispatch with valve-point effects

The dynamic economic dispatch (DED), with the consideration of valve-point effects, is a complicated non-linear constrained optimization problem with non-smooth and non-convex characteristics. In this paper, three chaotic differential evolution (CDE) methods are proposed based on the Tent equation to solve DED problem with valve-point effects. In the proposed methods, chaotic sequences are applied to obtain the dynamic parameter settings in DE. Meanwhile, a chaotic local search (CLS) operation for solving DED problem is designed to help DE avoiding premature convergence effectively. Finally, in order to handle the complicated constraints with efficiency, new heuristic constraints handling methods and feasibility based selection strategy are embedded into the proposed CDE methods. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed CDE methods are demonstrated for two test systems. The simulation results reveal that, compared with DE and those other methods reported in literatures recently, the proposed CDE methods are capable of obtaining better quality solutions with higher efficiency. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.