Economic dispatch seeks for the most economical combination of generation units in power system while satisfying bunch of physical and operational constraints. Finding the most economical generation strategy in power markets with several generation zones is crucial for power system operation. Conventional economic dispatch models cannot find the most economical generation schedule in power system with different generation zones. Moreover, the most economical schedule of generation cannot satisfy the environmental expectations. Therefore, compromising between generation cost and environmental issues is unavoidable. In this connection, total emission produces by generation units is taken into consideration as an objective function in concert with generation cost function. Furthermore, different operational constraints including valve-point effect, prohibited operating zones and multi-fuel operation are considered to make the proposed approach more realistic. Considering all these restrictions necessitate solving the proposed problem, i.e. multi-objective multi-area economic dispatch problem, by a reliable and strong optimization algorithm. In this regard, a hybrid evolutionary algorithm based on the shuffle frog leaping algorithm and the particle swarm optimization is proposed to solve the proposed problem. Effectiveness of the proposed hybrid algorithm is verified on different test systems. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.