Abstract: A self adaptive chaotic particle swarm optimization (SACPSO) algorithm was presented on the basis of economic load dispatch, which is of a problem of nonconvex, nonlinear and complex constrained. Based on the chaotic particle swarm optimization (CPSO), a global search made by the basic particle swarm optimization (PSO) which introduced mutation operator and social factor was not stopped until premature happened, then the optimal solutions of global search were used as initial population of chaotic local search (CLS) with Tent map. A linear combination of the decision variable returned by inverse mapping and the best particle of population was output as CLS’s results. In the end, the effectiveness of the new algorithm was verified by the system simulations of 6 and 15 units.