An improved harmony search algorithm for solved the combined heat and power economic dispatch

Abstract

The Harmony Search (HS) algorithm is a population-based meta-heuristic optimization algorithm. This algorithm is inspired by the music improvisation process in which the musician searches for harmony and continues to polish the pitches to obtain a better harmony. Although several variants of the HS algorithm have been proposed, their effectiveness in dealing with diverse problems is still unsatisfactory. The performances of these variants mainly depend on the selection of different parameters of the algorithm. This paper develops an improved harmony search (IHS) algorithm for solving optimization problems. IHS employs a novel method for generating new solution vectors that enhances accuracy and convergence rate of harmony search (HS) algorithm. The IHS algorithm has been successfully applied to various benchmarking and standard engineering optimization problems. The optimal utilization of multiple combined heat and power (CHP) systems is a complicated problem that needs powerful methods to solve. This paper presents an improved harmony search (IHS) algorithm to solve the combined heat and power economic dispatch (CHPED) problem. In this paper the impacts of constant parameters on harmony search algorithm are discussed and a strategy for tuning these parameters is presented. Numerical results reveal that the proposed algorithm can find better solutions when compared to HS and other heuristic or deterministic methods where IHS algorithm is a powerful for will be effective in the problems of CHPED.