INVESTIGATIONS ON HYBRID PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUE TO SOLVE OPTIMAL LOAD DISPATCH PROBLEMS WITH PROHIBITED OPERATING ZONES AND RAMP - RATE LIMIT CONSTRAINTS

This paper proposes a Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (HPSO) method that integrates the best features of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and the Evolutionary Programming (EP) techniques. The proposed HPSO method is applied to solve the Optimal Load Di spatch (OLD) problems taking in to consideration of prohibited operating zones, ramp rate limits, capacity limits and power balance constraints. In the proposed method, the best features of both PSO and EP are exploited and capable of finding optimal solut ions for the non - linear optimization problems. Numerical results show that the proposed method is well suitable for solving OLD problems and it outperforms the other methods like GA, EP and PSO in terms of convergence characteristics and quality of solutio n.