A fast particle swarm algorithm for solving smooth and non-smooth economic dispatch problems

The Economic Dispatch (ED) problem is a common task in the operational planning of a power system, which requires to be optimized. Such optimization includes two goals: (1) the minimization of the total scheduled cost and (2) the minimization of the response time. This article presents a fast Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach for solving the ED problem. The proposed approach is applied to five case studies, having different size and complexity. Three of them have a smooth fuel cost, whereas the other two have non-smooth load functions, with valve-points. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach provides good results on the test problems adopted, while requiring a lower computational time than other approaches taken from the specialized literature.