The new tendencies in the power system organization and the fast-changing technologies in the power industry dictate the need to keep track of the international experience and activities in the field of the modern economic dispatch problem. The goal of this paper was to provide a detailed account for papers published after 1990, the year that saw the beginning of major transformations in the power system organization. A comprehensive survey on mathematical formulations and a general background of methods, analyses, and developments in the field of economic dispatch is presented for the past 20 years based on more than 150 publications. The research literature in the field is classified into sections covering economic dispatch in both regulated and deregulated (reregulated) energy markets and where variable, partial predictable electricity generation is part of the generation portfolio. A database of the most common test systems used in the literature to test different economic dispatch methodologies is also provided.understanding of the problem and of the progress made to date, as well as for the electric utility industry to choose the most relevant solutions for their systems.The idea behind the ED problem is that at the central power control center the load changes are continuously monitored (in real time) and the dispatcher regulates generation (typically only real power is considered) to match the total power generation with the total power demand. This generation regulation is performed in such a manner as to minimize the operating cost while satisfying all the operating constraints. Such constraints may include the load balance, the transmission constraints, the spinning reserve of the system, multiple emission requirements, and minimum upper and lower limits [9][10][11][12]. Important aspects of this optimization problem are that the generation cost of each individual unit is not proportional to the generation level of the respective unit and that the power systems are geographically spread out, and thus, the transmission losses are dependent on the generation and demand patterns and their flow within the system.In deregulated energy markets, the vertically integrated utilities serving their own load are replaced by competing entities in a horizontally integrated environment. The GENCOs are no longer responsible for meeting the daily load cycle, which is now the system operator's (SO) responsibility, but the net sum of a set of transactions is the one that determines the shape of a GENCO's profile. Thus, from the view point of GENCOs, the ED problem may be formulated as a maximization of the profit [11][12][13] or as a minimization of the cost incorporating power wheeling costs [14,15]. Further to the classical formulation of the ED problem, reactive power dispatch may also be considered.According to the newly established regulations toward climate change in many European countries and in the USA [16,17], variable renewable energy sources (RES), such as wind and solar, is expected to increase its penetrati...