Combined Heat and Power Economic Dispatch Using Differential Evolution

In this paper, the differential evolution (DE) algorithm is introduced to solve the combined heat and power economic dispatch (CHPED) problem, a non-convex, non-linear and non-different optimization problem under a number of constraints. DE is a simple yet powerful algorithm which mainly adopts the mutation, crossover and selection operators, and it can solve the CHPED problem easily. To confirm the superiority of DE, an experiment on a power system with 24 units (14 conventional units, 7 CHP units and 3 pure heat units) is conducted, and the performance of DE is compared with other 9 intelligent algorithms. A parameter study with scaling factor F, crossover rate CR and different mutation operators is performed to find the best operators. The experimental results confirm the performance of the DE over other algorithms as a powerful technology for optimization problems.