A Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA 2) approach for solving the multi-objective Environmental / Economic Power Dispatch (EEPD) problem is presented in this paper. In the past fuel cost consumption minimization was the aim (a single objective function) of economic power dispatch problem. Since the clean air act amendments have been applied to reduce SO2 and NOX emissions from power plants, the utilities change their strategies in order to reduce pollution and atmospheric emission as well, adding emission minimization as other objective function made economic power dispatch (EPD) a multi-objective problem having conflicting objectives. SPEA2 is the improved version of SPEA with better fitness assignment, density estimation, and modified archive truncation. In addition fuzzy set theory is employed to extract the best compromise solution. Several optimization run of the proposed method are carried out on 3-units system and 6-units standard IEEE 30-bus test system. The results demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed method to generate well-distributed Pareto-optimal non-dominated feasible solutions in single run. The comparison with other multi-objective methods demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method.
