Journal of Applied Mathematics
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 427936, 5 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/427936
Research Article

Economic Dispatch Using Parameter-Setting-Free Harmony Search

Department of Energy and Information Technology, Gachon University, Seongnam 461-701, Republic of Korea

Received 5 February 2013; Revised 26 March 2013; Accepted 8 April 2013

Academic Editor: Xin-She Yang

Copyright © 2013 Zong Woo Geem. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Economic dispatch is one of the popular energy system optimization problems. Recently, it has been solved by various phenomenon-mimicking metaheuristic algorithms such as genetic algorithm, tabu search, evolutionary programming, particle swarm optimization, harmony search, honey bee mating optimization, and firefly algorithm. However, those phenomenon-mimicking problems require a tedious and troublesome process of algorithm parameter value setting. Without a proper parameter setting, good results cannot be guaranteed. Thus, this study adopts a newly developed parameter-setting-free technique combined with the harmony search algorithm and applies it to the economic dispatch problem for the first time, obtaining good results. Hopefully more researchers in energy system fields will adopt this user-friendly technique in their own problems in the future.