A general model for energy hub economic dispatch

- Modeling the economic dispatch of energy hubs.
- Proposing a new optimization algorithm namely SAL-TVAC-GSA.
- Considering electricity, gas, heat, cool, and compressed air as energy carriers.
- Including the valve-point loading effect and prohibited zones of electrical power-only units.

This paper proposes a new optimization algorithm, namely Self-Adoptive Learning with Time Varying Acceleration Coefficient-Gravitational Search Algorithm (SAL-TVAC-GSA), to solve highly nonlinear, non-convex, non-smooth, non-differential, and high-dimension single- and multi-objective Energy Hub Economic Dispatch (EHED) problems. The presented algorithm is based on GSA considering three fundamental modifications to improve the quality solution and performance of original GSA. Moreover, a new optimization framework for economic dispatch is adapted to a system of energy hubs considering different hub structures, various energy carriers (electricity, gas, heat, cool, and compressed air), valve-point loading effect and prohibited zones of electric-only units, as well as the different equality and inequality constraints. To show the effectiveness of the suggested method, a high-complex energy hub system consisting of 39 hubs with 29 structures and 76 energy (electricity, gas, and heat) production units is proposed. Two individual objectives including energy cost and hub losses are minimized separately as two single-objective EHED problems. These objectives are simultaneously minimized in the multi-objective optimization. Results obtained by SAL-TVAC-GSA in terms of quality solution and computational performance are compared with Enhanced GSA (EGSA), GSA, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Genetic Algorithm (GA) to demonstrate the ability of the proposed algorithm in finding an operating point with lower objective function.