Economic dispatch of large-scale integrated heat and power systems by application of a novel harmony search approach

Abstract The combined heat and power (CHP) economic dispatch determines the optimal power and heat supply of different generation units such as CHP plants, thermal generation units, and boilers with minimum operation cost. The CHP technology is beneficial in terms of increasing the efficiency of heat and power load supply up to 90%. In addition, such technology can decrease the emission of environmental pollutant gases by 13%–18%. This chapter aims to study economic dispatch of large-scale hybrid heat and power systems by using a novel harmony search approach. The proposed heuristic optimization approach will be applied on two large-scale test systems in order to investigate the capability of the method in decreasing the operation cost of supplying heat and power loads. The introduced improved harmony search (IHS) optimization procedure is employed on a large-scale cogeneration network containing 84 generation plants and 96 production plants to investigate the effectiveness of the IHS concept. Simulation results are reported for the two abovementioned case studies as large-scale heat and power systems with detailed discussion and analysis. In addition, the results of this method are compared with those obtained in previous studies, which shows the high performance of the optimization procedure in terms of operation cost and convergence speed.