Scheduling of combined heat and generation outputs in power systems using a new hybrid multi-objective optimization algorithm

In this paper, a hybrid optimization algorithm, consisted of weighted vertices-based optimizer (WVO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, is proposed to solve three economic frameworks for scheduling of power sources in order to meet the required power demand in power systems. These frameworks are economic power dispatch, economic emission power dispatch and combined heat and economic power dispatch problems. The basic idea of weighted vertices optimizer (WVO) is given from the bisection root-finding method in mathematics. It uses swarm intelligence and evolutionary strategy to efficiently find the optimum solution. However, the original WVO algorithm has some flaws in complex problems with a high number of variables and constraints. Therefore, this paper presents hybrid WVO–PSO algorithm which solved the mentioned flaws and also improved its speed and accuracy. In this algorithm, varying speed is defined for each vertex by using PSO which helps better exploration through the search space. To evaluate the performance of WVO–PSO, it is applied to some of well-known and complex emission/economic dispatch (EED), combined heat and power economic dispatch (CHPED) and combined heat and power emission/economic dispatch (CHPEED) problems and then the driven results are compared with other recent methods which demonstrates better performance of the proposed method in solving non-convex and constrained EED, CHPED and CHPEED problem in terms of minimizing costs and emissions.