Neighborhood-based differential evolution algorithm with direction induced strategy for the large-scale combined heat and power economic dispatch problem

Abstract

The combined heat and power economic dispatch (CHPED) problem is a complicated non-convex optimization problem with several constraints that has been a challenging and important task in the power system. Great efforts have been made to solve the small-scale CHPED problem, and there is considerable scope for research in the large-scale CHPED problem with lots of local optima. This paper presents a neighborhood-based differential evolution algorithm with direction induced strategy (NDIDE) to solve the large-scale CHPED problem. In NDIDE, a novel mutation strategy, named neighborhood nonelite direction induced strategy based on DE/rand/1 (DE/ldrand/1), is proposed to explore some untrodden areas of a search space using the direction information of pointing to inferior solutions within a small neighborhood. Such a strategy helps to strengthen the exploitation of some selected neighborhoods. Consequently, a good balance between exploration and exploitation abilities could be achieved. NDIDE is implemented on the CHPED systems with 7, 84, 96 and 192 units. The dispatch schedules obtained from NDIDE are feasible in three large CHPED systems and show the advantages of NDIDE in terms of cost savings and the robustness over the results obtained by three state-of-the-art differential evolution algorithms as well as recent works in this field.