TY - JFULL AU - S. Rao Rayapudi PY - 2011/11/ TI - An Intelligent Water Drop Algorithm for Solving Economic Load Dispatch Problem T2 - International Journal of Energy and Power Engineering SP - 1377 EP - 1384 VL - 5 SN - 1307-6892 UR - https://publications.waset.org/pdf/11394 PU - World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology NX - Open Science Index 58, 2011 N2 - Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) is a method of determining the most efficient, low-cost and reliable operation of a power system by dispatching available electricity generation resources to supply load on the system. The primary objective of economic dispatch is to minimize total cost of generation while honoring operational constraints of available generation resources. In this paper an intelligent water drop (IWD) algorithm has been proposed to solve ELD problem with an objective of minimizing the total cost of generation. Intelligent water drop algorithm is a swarm-based natureinspired optimization algorithm, which has been inspired from natural rivers. A natural river often finds good paths among lots of possible paths in its ways from source to destination and finally find almost optimal path to their destination. These ideas are embedded into the proposed algorithm for solving economic load dispatch problem. The main advantage of the proposed technique is easy is implement and capable of finding feasible near global optimal solution with less computational effort. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, it has been tested on 6-unit and 20-unit test systems with incremental fuel cost functions taking into account the valve point-point loading effects. Numerical results shows that the proposed method has good convergence property and better in quality of solution than other algorithms reported in recent literature. ER -