Economic Load Dispatch for IEEE 30-Bus System Using PSO

ELD or economic load dispatch is a crucial aspect in any practical power network. Economic load dispatch is the technique whereby the active power outputs are allocated to generator units in the most cost-effective way in compliance with all constraints of the network. The traditional methods for solving ELD include Lambda-Iterative Technique, Newton-Raphson Method, Gradient method, etc. All these traditional algorithms need the incremental fuel cost curves of the generators to be increasing monotonically or piece-wise linear. But in practice the input-output characteristics of a generator are highly non-linear leading to a challenging non-convex optimisation problem. Methods like artificial intelligence, DP (dynamic programming), GA (genetic algorithms), and PSO (particle swarm optimisation) solve non-convex optimisation problems in an efficient manner and obtain a fast and near global and optimum solution. In this project ELD problem has been solved using Lambda-Iterative technique, GA (Genetic Algorithms) and PSO (Particle Swarm Optimisation) and the results have been compared. All the analyses have been made in MATLAB environment