Evolutionary Multi-objective Environmental/Economic Dispatch: Stochastic Versus Deterministic Approaches

Due to the environmental concerns that arise from the emissions produced by fossil-fueled electric power plants, the classical economic dispatch, which operates electric power systems so as to minimize only the total fuel cost, can no longer be considered alone. Thus, by environmental dispatch, emissions can be reduced by dispatch of power generation to minimize emissions. The environmental/economic dispatch problem has been most commonly solved using a deterministic approach. However, power generated, system loads, fuel cost and emission coefficients are subjected to inaccuracies and uncertainties in real-world situations. In this paper, the problem is tackled using both deterministic and stochastic approaches of different complexities. The Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm – II (NSGA-II), an elitist multi-objective evolutionary algorithm capable of finding multiple Pareto-optimal solutions with good diversity in one single run is used for solving the environmental/economic dispatch problem. Simulation results are presented for the standard IEEE 30-bus system.