Journal of Electronic Systems Lei Zhang, Cunlu Dang, Guangqing Bao, Xiaohong Hao, Qun Qu, Suoping Li 7 3 2002 http://www.dline.info/jes/fulltext/v7n3/jesv7n3_2.pdf This paper proposed an improved differential evolution algorithm for solving economic load dispatch (ELD) problems of power systems. In the proposed algorithm, the double mutation operators are employed. One is used to maintain the diversity of the population; and the other is to accelerate the convergence speed. Meanwhile, an adaptive updating method of parameter and a chaotic local search is introduced to improve the performance of IDE. Finally, two types of ELD problems were used to test the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively solve these problems.