In a deregulated multi-area electrical power system the objective is to determine the most economical generation dispatch strategy that could satisfy the area load demands, the tie-line limits and other operating constraints. Usually, economic dispatch (ED) deals only with the cost minimization, but minimization of emission content has also become an equally important concern due to the mandatory requirement of pollution reduction for environmental protection. Environmental economic dispatch (EED) is a complex multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem with conflicting goals. Normally a fuzzy ranking is employed to rank the large number of Pareto solutions obtained after solving a MOO problem. But in this paper the preference of the decision maker (DM) is used to guide the search and to select the population for the next generation. An improved differential evolution (DE) method is proposed where the selection operation is modified to reduce the complexity of multi-attribute decision making with the help of a fuzzy framework. Solutions are assigned a fuzzy rank on the basis of their level of satisfaction for different objectives before the population selection and then the fuzzy rank is used to select and pass on better solutions to the next generation. A well distributed Pareto-front is obtained which presents a large number of alternate trade-off solutions for the power system operator. A momentum operation is also included to prevent stagnation and to create Pareto diversity. Studies are carried out on three test cases and results obtained are found to be better than some previous literature. 
Environmental economic dispatch in multi-area power system employing improved differential evolution with fuzzy selection