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Economic dispatch (ED) aims to allocate the generation of units to minimize the total production cost. This dispatch is generally formulated with nonsmooth and nonconvex cost function due to valve-point effects and various constraints, where the conventional methods are inapplicable. An improved social spider optimization algorithm, namely, ISSO, is proposed in this paper to solve the ED problem with valve-point effects. That is, dynamic updating mechanism of the subpopulations, Gaussian mating radius, and multimating strategy are introduced into the ISSO. These mechanisms facilitate a compromise between the global exploration and local exploitation of the search process. Numerical experiments are conducted on benchmark functions and different scale generation units commonly considered in the literature to validate the feasibility of the proposed ISSO. Computational results are analyzed in terms of solution quality by the statistical method, which shows the superiority of the ISSO algorithm in comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms.