The aim of economic dispatch (ED) problem is to provide an efficient utilization of energy resources to produce economic and secure operating conditions for the planning and operation of a power system. ED is formed as a nonlinear optimization problem with conflicting objectives and subjected to both inequality and equality constraints. An efficient improvement of krill herd (KH) algorithm, a powerful metaheuristic method, has been introduced in this paper. The KH algorithm inspired by the Lagrangian and evolutionary behaviour of the krill people in nature, has been investigated to solve ED problem on 6, 13, 20 and 40 generating units. The proposed chaotic krill herd (CKH)) improvement is done by incorporating the chaos approach to KH algorithm for raising the global convergence speed and for enhancing its performance. The elitism scheme serves to save the best krill during the procedure when updating the krill. The results show clearly the superiority of CKH in searching for the best cost value results when compared with well-known metaheuristic search algorithms.
