A combination of FA and SRPSO algorithm for Combined Heat and Power Economic Dispatch

This paper represents a hybrid Firefly and Self-Regulating Particle Swarm Optimization (FSRPSO) algorithm to solve optimal Combined Heat and Power Economic Dispatch (CHPED) problem. Valve point effect on fuel cost function of pure generation units, electrical power losses in transmission systems and feasible operating zones are taken into account in the CHPED problem. The CHPED refers to minimize total costs of fuel for electricity and heat generation supply to load demand. The proposed FSRPSO attempts to determine the start of the local search process properly by checking the previous global best. Thus, the FSRPSO is able to exploit strong points of both Firefly Algorithm (FA) and SRPSO mechanisms in order to balance between exploration and exploitation phases. Besides, for the sake of validation the proposed hybrid method, the FSRPSO is examined on 21 well-known benchmarks, and also a real engineering case i.e., two power systems for evaluating its performance compared with the SRPSO, FA, PSO, and other state-of-the-art algorithms. The obtained optimization results show that the proposed FSRPSO provides fast, mature and reliable optimum solutions and outperform other compared algorithms in diverse categories of benchmarks along with the studied CHPED problem.