Abstract
This paper develops a new framework to solve the practical non-convex economic dispatch problem with regard to the constraints including ramp rate limits, valve loading effect, prohibited operating zone, spinning reserve and multi-fuel option. In the proposed framework, bat algorithm, as a new optimization algorithm, is employed to explore the problem search space globally. In addition, a newly introduced adaptive modification method is developed to improve the variety of the bat population when increasing the convergence speed simultaneously. This modification is constructed based on the roulette wheel mechanism in conjunction with the crossover and mutation operators from the genetic algorithm. At the end of paper, the superiority of the proposed framework is examined using the IEEE 10-unit and 40-unit test systems.