Solving multi-area economic dispatch problem using hybrid exchange market algorithm with grasshopper optimization algorithm

This research work proposes the hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm to solve the multi-area economic dispatch problem to operate the power systems economically. The proposed hybrid algorithm combines the exchange market and grasshopper optimization algorithms. The grasshopper optimization algorithm sometimes suffers from premature convergence. To overcome this drawback, a hybrid algorithm for the better balance between exploration and exploitation and thus finding optimal solutions with high quality and robustness, is proposed in this paper. The main target of this paper is to investigate the application of the hybrid algorithm for optimizing the multi-area economic dispatch problem, satisfying different constraints of the valve point loading effect, multiple fuels, prohibited operation zones, ramp-rate limit, the tie-line constraints, and transmission loses. In this regard, after validation of the proposed hybrid algorithm by applying it on some benchmark functions of diverse nature, the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm are evaluated in three case studies of the multi-area economic dispatch problem. The comparative results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of robustness and quality solutions. Also, the applied method reduces the fuel cost in the range of 0.0229%–1.1622%.