Inertia Weight and Constriction Factor Approaches of Particle Swarm Optimization to Solve the Economic Load Dispatch Problem

This paper proposes a comparison between Inertia Weight and Constriction Factors approaches in Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in solving Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) problem in power systems. There are several non-linear characteristics of practical generators such as ramp rate limits, prohibited zones and non-smooth cost functions that need to be taken into account to obtain a solution that can be closely applied to the real system. The performance of Inertia Weight and Constriction Factors approaches in (PSO) will be compared through the consistency of objective function’s values and time taken to obtain the optimal solutions. The optimization results show that both approaches in PSO produced almost the same objective function’s values although there are slight differences in the algorithms.