Differential evolution based on ε-domination and orthogonal design method for power environmentally-friendly dispatch

This paper proposes a differential evolution algorithm based on ε-domination and orthogonal design method (ε-ODEMO) to solve power dispatch problem considering environment protection and saving energy. Besides the operation costs of thermal power plant, contaminative gas emission is also optimized as an objective. In the proposed algorithm, ε-dominance is adopted to make genetic algorithm obtain a good distribution of Pareto-optimal solutions in a small computational time, and the orthogonal design method can generate an initial population of points that are scattered uniformly over the feasible solution space, these modify the differential evolution algorithm (DE) to make it suit for multi-objective optimization (MOO) problems and improve its performance. A test hydrothermal system is used to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with other methods, the results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for solving the power environmentally-friendly dispatch problem.

► Differential evolution algorithm on ε-domination and orthogonal design is proposed.
► The orthogonal design method generates an initial population scattered uniformly.
► ε-Dominance is adopted to obtain a good distribution of Pareto-optimal solutions.
► ε-ODEMO is able to better distribute its population along the obtained front.
► The results show the effectiveness for solving the power dispatch problem.