1 Application of Artificial Neural Network in Economic Generation Scheduling of Thermal Power Plants Mohammad Mohatram Department of Electrical & Electronics Engineering Sanjay Kumar Department of Computer Science Engineering Waljat Colleges of Applied Sciences, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, with Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra (Ranchi), India Email: mohatram@waljatcolleges.edu.om , mmohtram20@rediffmail.com Abstract- The artificial neural network has been applied to the economic generation scheduling of six thermal power plants with very promising results. In this problem equality constraints of power balance and inequality plant generation capacity constraints are considered. The transmission losses occurring are also considered. The inputs to the neural network contain the total load supplied. The electric power generation of six thermal power plants and the total system transmission losses are taken as the output of the neural network. A program in C language is developed to generate training and test pattern for the network developed. At the end performance and time taken in execution of the neural network is compared with the Classical Kirchmayer Method and it is observed that the neural network being very fast and accurate. Therefore, it may replace effectively the conventional practices presently performed in different central load dispatch centers. 1. Introduction The size of electric power system is increasing rapidly to meet the energy requirements. A number of power plants are connected in parallel to supply the system load by interconnection of power stations. With the development of grid system it becomes necessary to operate the plant unit most economically. The economic generation scheduling problem involves two separate steps namely the unit commitment and the online economic dispatch. The unit commitment is the selection of unit that will supply the anticipated load of the system over a required period of time at minimum cost as well as provide a specified margin of the operating reserve. The function of the online economic dispatch is to distribute the load among the generating units actually paralleled with the system in such a manner as to minimize the total cost of supplying the