Abstract: This paper proposes an improved approach based on
conventional particle swarm optimization (PSO) for solving an
economic dispatch(ED) problem with considering the generator
constraints. The mutation operators of the differential evolution (DE)
are used for improving diversity exploration of PSO, which called
particle swarm optimization with mutation operators (PSOM). The
mutation operators are activated if velocity values of PSO nearly to
zero or violated from the boundaries. Four scenarios of mutation
operators are implemented for PSOM. The simulation results of all
scenarios of the PSOM outperform over the PSO and other existing
approaches which appeared in literatures.