Improved flower pollination algorithm for short term hydrothermal scheduling

Abstract

This paper presents improved flower pollination algorithm (IFPA) for solution of short term hydrothermal scheduling problem. Flower pollination algorithm (FPA) is a new meta-heuristic search algorithm inspired by the pollination process of flowers. The FPA performs efficiently due to its effective control of global and local search mechanisms which allow user controlled exploration and exploitation of the search space. In IFPA the local pollination process of FPA is controlled by adding a scaling factor and an additional intensive exploitation phase is added to tune and improve the best solution. The performance of IFPA and FPA is analyzed on three different standard test cases considering smooth cost function with and without prohibited discharge zones, valve point loading effect in thermal unit with smooth cost function and constraint such as prohibited discharge zones. The simulation results are also compared with FPA and some recently reported methodologies to confirm the performance superiority of the proposed IFPA algorithm.