Combined heat and power economic dispatch problem solution by implementation of whale optimization method

Combined heat and power economic dispatch (CHPED) is introduced as a difficult optimization problem, which provides optimal generation scheduling of heat and power units. The CHPED problem aims to minimize the fuel cost of CHP units with the consideration of operational constraints. In this paper, whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is employed to solve CHPED problem. WOA is a new meta-heuristic optimization technique, which is introduced recently for solving optimization problems. Social behavior of humpback whales is the basic idea of proposal of WOA, where the bubble-net hunting strategy inspires this optimization procedure. Three test systems are considered for evaluation of the performance of the WOA in solving the non-convex nonlinear CHPED problem. The first test instance, which includes 24 units, is studied for evaluating WOA performance in finding the optimal solution of CHPED problem. 84-Unit and 96-unit test systems are introduced for the first time in this paper to show the superiority of WOA in solving non-convex CHPED optimization problem. The second test system contains 40 power-only units, 24 CHP units, and 20 heat-only units. Additionally, the third test instance contains 52 power-only units, 24 CHP units, and 20 heat-only units. The obtained optimal solutions represent WOA efficiency and feasibility and capability of obtaining better solutions with respect to other optimization techniques in terms of operational cost and ability of implementation of WOA on large systems.