Energies
This paper proposes applications of a modified stochastic fractal search algorithm (MSFS) to solve the economic load dispatch problem (ELD) in which valve-point effects, prohibited operating zones, power losses in all conductors, multi-fuel sources and other constraints of power system are taken into consideration. The proposed method is first developed in the study by performing two modifications on two procedures of new solution generation from conventional stochastic fractal search (SFS). The first modification is used to change the strategy of producing new solutions of the first and the second update procedures while the second one is to newly update the worst solutions in the first update process and the best solutions in the second update process. These modifications have major influence on the solution search performance of the proposed method. All improvements of the proposed method can be illustrated by solving and analyzing results from various test systems with different system scales including 3-unit, 6-unit, 10-unit, and 20-unit systems. Comparison of results obtained by MSFS, SFS, and other existing methods indicates that the proposed MSFS method is more effective and robust than compared methods in terms of solution quality, high-quality solution search stability and convergence process. Consequently, the proposed method should be used as a very favorable optimization method for the ELD problem and it should be tried for other optimization problems in electrical engineering.
