The economic dispatch has the objective of generation allocation to the power generators in such a manner that the total fuel cost is minimized while all operating constraints are satisfied. Conventional optimization methods assume generator cost curves to be continuous and monotonically increasing, but modern generators have a variety of nonlinearities in their cost curves making this assumption inaccurate, and the resulting approximate dispatches cause a lot of revenue loss. Evolutionary methods like particle swarm optimization perform better for such problems as no convexity assumptions are imposed, but these methods converge to sub-optimum solutions prematurely, particularly for multimodal problems.To handle the problem of premature convergence, this paper proposes to apply a novel self-organizing hierarchical particle swarm optimization (SOH_PSO) for the nonconvex economic dispatch (NCED). The performance further improves when time-varying acceleration coefficients are included. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms previous methods for NCED.Index Terms-Nonconvex economic dispatch (NCED), premature convergence, prohibited operating zones (POZ), ramp rate limits, self-organizing hierarchical particle swarm optimization (SOH_PSO), time-varying acceleration coefficients (TVAC), valve point loading effect.

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