Intelligent Tuned Harmony Search for Solving Economic Dispatch Problem with Valve-point Effects and Prohibited Operating Zones

Economic dispatch with valve point effect and Prohibited Operating Zones (POZs) is a non-convex and discontinuous optimization problem. Harmony Search (HS) is one of the recently presented meta-heuristic algorithms for solving optimization problems, which has different variants. The performances of these variants are severely affected by selection of different parameters of the algorithm. Intelligent Tuned Harmony Search (ITHS) is a recently developed variant, which mitigates the drawbacks of parameter initializing by maintaining a proper balance between diversification and intensification throughout the search process. The proposed method is applied to five different cases of power systems and the effectiveness, feasibility, and robustness of method is explored through the comparison with reported results in recent literature. First three case studies are systems with 3, 13, and 40-units, considering valve- point effect. The fourth and fifth cases are six and 15-generation unit taking into account generator constraints including POZs, ramp rate limit and transmission line losses which is a challenging Economic Dispatch (ED) problem due to restriction in search space. Computation results imply the efficiency of the proposed method toward other optimization methods reported in recent literature, judged in terms of the objective function value and solution robustness.