A comparative study has been made on the solutions obtained using combined economic emission dispatch (CEED) problem considering line flow constraints using different intelligent techniques for the regulated power system to ensure a practical, economical and secure generation schedule. The objective of the paper is to minimize the total production cost of the power generation. Economic load dispatch (ELD) and economic emission dispatch (EED) have been applied to obtain optimal fuel cost of generating units. Combined economic emission dispatch (CEED) is obtained by considering both the economic and emission objectives. This bi-objective CEED problem is converted into single objective function using price penalty factor approach. In this paper, intelligent techniques such as genetic algorithm (GA), evolutionary programming (EP), particle swarm optimization (PSO), differential evolution (DE) are applied to obtain CEED solutions for the IEEE 30-bus system and 15-unit system. This proposed algorithm introduces an efficient CEED approach that obtains the minimum operating cost satisfying unit, emission and network constraints. The proposed algorithm has been tested on two sample systems viz the IEEE 30-bus system and a 15-unit system. The results obtained by the various artificial intelligent techniques are compared with respect to the solution time, total production cost and convergence criteria. The solutions obtained are quite encouraging and useful in the economic emission environment. The algorithm and simulation are carried out using Matlab software. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.