Power plants usually operate on the strategy of
economic dispatch (ED) regardless of emissions produced. Environmental considerations have become one of the major management concerns. Under these circumstances, the alternative strategy of environmental/
economic dispatch (EED) is becoming more and more desirable for not only resulting in great
economical benefit, but also reducing the pollutants emission.
Based on the literature survey, few attempts have been made at considering valve-point effects for the realistic environmental/economic dispatch (EED) problem. This paper proposes a new efficient hybrid differential evolution algorithm with harmony search (DE-HS) to solve the multiobjective environmental/economic dispatch (EED) problems that feature nonsmooth cost curves. The proposed approach combines in the most effective way the properties of differential evolution (DE) and harmony search (HS) algorithms. To enhance the local search capability of the original DE method, the fresh individual generation mechanism of the HS is utilized.
Numerical results for three case studies have been presented to illustrate the performance and applicability of the proposed hybrid method. The comparative results with some of the most recently published methods confirm the effectiveness of the proposed strategy to find accurate and feasible optimal solutions for practical EED problems.
