Solving Economic Load Dispatch problem with valve loading effect using adaptive real coded quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm

Economical dispatch of power is a significant real time optimization problem in the operation of power system, which allocates the loads on the committed generating units to reduce the generation cost, while meeting all the inequality and equality constraints. Traditionally, economic load dispatch problems have been formulated as convex optimization problem and various classical methods such as gradient methods, base-point participation factor method, etc. have been used for solving them. The traditional formulation is a quadratic input-output curve or piece wise linear cost curve, which are continuous and convex, however, real generating units have valve loading effects, which make the cost curve discontinuous and non-convex and hence the economic dispatch problem is no longer simple to handle. Thus, the classical methods cannot be employed for non-convex problems. The non-convex, non-linear and discontinuous economic dispatch (ED) problem can be better solved by metaheuristic approaches. Such approaches often require tuning of their respective evolutionary parameters. Although, solution to such type of problem have already been solved by different metaheuristic optimization techniques in previous studies as well, however, the algorithm employed in this paper to solve Power Economic Load Dispatch (PELD) problem is adaptive real coded quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm, which does not require tuning of evolutionary parameters and performs better than some of the existing techniques on standard 6-bus 3 machine system and IEEE 14 bus 5 unit system.