Atavistic genetic algorithm for economic dispatch with valve point effect

This paper presents a new approach on using genetic algorithms for economic dispatch problem for valve point discontinuities. The proposed approach in this paper on genetic algorithms improves the performance to solve economic dispatch problem through combination of penalty function with death penalty, generation-apart elitism, atavism and heuristic crossover. Numerical results on a test system consisting of 13 thermal units show that the proposed approach has an ability to find the better solutions than the conventional genetic algorithm.