Surrogate worth trade-off method for multi-objective thermal power load dispatch

The multi-objective thermal power dispatch (MTPLD) problem allocates power demand among the committed generating units while minimizing the operating cost and pollutant's emission objectives simultaneously, subject to physical and technological constraints. The success to find MTPLD solution relies on the decision-maker's ability to select compromised solution under uncertain/diverse conditions and the search algorithm's potential to generate non-dominated solutions. Owing to ambiguous choice of objectives, this paper presents a fuzzy surrogate worth trade-off approach to decide the preferred solution among the non-dominated solution set. The uniformity of non-dominated solution set is maintained exploiting a quality measure approach. This paper presents a novel foraging activity paradigm to generate non-dominated solutions. The presented approach comprises of fly and walk behavior of preys. The direction of turn heuristic of prey handles system's equality constraint. The search algorithm balances exploration and exploitation and handles system constraints autonomously. The performance of proposed algorithm is investigated using generalized benchmark functions and multi-fuel, medium and large power system MTPLD problems. The experimental results shows that the proposed approach is robust, depends on least parameters and retains Pareto quality in independent trials while generating non-dominated solutions in a trial run.