An experimental study regarding economic load dispatch using search group optimization

Power System network is formed mainly to generate power from all the generators to fulfil total load demand and transmission line losses. The Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) problem is considered to be one of the most important problems of cost minimization in power system operations. Various approaches have been taken to solve the ELD problem. In this paper a powerful Search Group Optimization (SGO) technique is implemented to solve the ELD problem. SGO maintains a good balance between the exploitation and the exploration phases of the technique. This optimization technique tends to find the promising regions of the search space from the first iteration onwards. The algorithm uses five important steps to reach the optimal solution of the ELD problem. Namely, initial population, initial selection of search group, search group mutation, family generation and new search group selection. Using these five steps, the SGO tends to make a smooth transition towards the optimized solution. The SGO is applied to five test systems and the final results obtained have been compared to various other recently developed optimization techniques. The results prove the robustness, feasibility, effectiveness and efficiency of SGO in terms of computational time and proximity to the global optimum solution.