Combined Heat and Power Economic Dispatch Problem Solution using Particle Swarm Optimization with Unique Inertia Factor

Combined heat and power economic dispatch (CHPED) is one of the important issues in power systems. CHPED is a challenging optimization problem of non-linear and non-convex type. Thus, evolutionary and heuristic algorithms are employed as effective tools in solving this problem. This paper proposes a new approach to solve CHPED problem using particle swarm optimization with unique inertia factor (PSO-UIF) algorithm in which there is no similar inertia coefficient for all population. Contrary to the particle swarm optimization (PSO), in the proposed method, there is an inertia weight, in each iteration, for each member of the population. Hence, in the proposed method, some populations have unique inertia coefficient and consequently a unique velocity in looking for the global optimum points. In order to examine the proposed algorithm's capabilities two test systems are optimized considering valve-point effect, system power loss and system constraints. The numerical results were compared to those of the other existing techniques. The result of comparisons shows the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.