Short-term Scheduling of Steam Power System in Iron and Steel Industry under Time-of-use Power Price

A generalized formulation for short-term scheduling of steam power system in iron and steel industry under the time-of-use (TOU) power price was presented, with minimization of total operational cost including fuel cost, equipment maintenance cost and the charge of exchange power with main grid. The model took into account the varying nature of surplus byproduct gas flows, several practical technical constraints and the impact of TOU power price. All major types of utility equipments, involving boilers, steam turbines, combined heat and power (CHP) units, and waste heat and energy recovery generators (WHERG), were separately modeled using thermodynamic balance equations and regression method. In order to solve this complex nonlinear optimization model, a new improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) algorithm was proposed by incorporating time-variant parameters, a self-adaptive mutation scheme and efficient constraint handling strategies. Finally, a case study for a real industrial example was used for illustrating the model and validating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.