Economic load dispatch solutions considering multiple fuels for thermal units and generation cost of wind turbines

In this paper, economic load dispatch (ELD) problem is solved by applying a suggested improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) for reaching the lowest total power generation cost from wind farms (WFs) and thermal units (TUs). The suggested IPSO is the modified version of Particle swarm optimization (PSO) by changing velocity and position updates. The five best solutions are employed to replace the so-far best position of each particle in velocity update mechanism and the five best solutions are used to replace previous position of each particle in position update. In addition, constriction factor is also used in the suggested IPSO. PSO, constriction factor-based PSO (CFPSO) and bat optimization algorithm (BOA) are also run for comparisons. Two systems are used to run the four methods. The first system is comprised of nine TUs with multiple fuels and one wind farm. The second system is comprised of eight TUs with multiple fuels and two WFs. From the comparisons of results, IPSO is much more powerful than three others and it can find optimal power generation with the lowest total power generation cost