A new particle swarm optimization solution to nonconvex economic dispatch problems

This paper proposes a new version of the classical particle swarm optimization (PSO), namely, new PSO (NPSO), to solve nonconvex economic dispatch problems. In the classical PSO the movement of a particle is governed by three behaviors, namely, inertial, cognitive,,and social. The cognitive behavior helps the particle to remember its previously visited best position. This paper proposes a split-up in the cognitive behavior. That is, the particle is made to remember its worst position also. This modification helps to explore the search space very effectively. In order to well exploit the promising solution region, a simple local random search (LRS) procedure is integrated with NPSO. The resultant NPSO-LRS algorithm is very effective in solving the nonconvex economic dispatch problems. To validate the proposed N-PSO-LRS method, it is applied to three test systems having nonconvex solution spaces, and better results are obtained when compared with previous approaches.