A harmony-genetic based heuristic approach toward economic dispatching combined heat and power

The Combined Heat and Power Economic Dispatch (CHPED) problem seeks to determine the heat and power production to minimize the system production costs and satisfy the heat-power demands and capacity constraints. This study examines the combined heat and power dispatching needs of cogeneration plants, and investigates the performance of an evolutionary computing approach which is based on both genetic algorithm (GA) and harmony search (HS). Experimental results were conducted for an extensive comparison with GA and HS to confirm the superior performance of this hybrid approach in cost minimization and computation times. The output results indicate that the proposed algorithm is capable of managing the CHPED problem and yields high-quality solutions.