Cuckoo search algorithm for combined heat and power economic dispatch

•New efficient CSA method has been successfully applied for solving CHPED problem.•The proposed CSA owns a set of few and easily selected control parameters.•The proposed CSA can obtain high solution quality with fast computational time.•The CSA method is very effective and robust for the CHPED problem.

This paper proposes a cuckoo search algorithm (CSA) for solving for the combined heat and power economic dispatch (CHPED) problem considering valve point loading effects on fuel cost function of pure power generation units and electrical power losses in transmission systems. The main objective of the CHPED problem is to minimize the total fuel cost for producing electricity and heat supplying to a load demand. The proposed CSA method inspired from the reproduction behavior of cuckoo birds has attracted many researchers implementing to engineering optimization problems since it has showed several advantages of few control parameters, high solution quality and fast computational time. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed CSA have been validated on five different systems including three systems with quadratic fuel cost function of pure power units neglecting transmission losses and two systems with nonconvex fuel cost function of pure power units. The result comparisons between the CSA method and other methods for the test systems have revealed that the CSA method can obtain higher quality solution with faster computational time than many other methods. Therefore, the proposed CSA method can be a very efficient method for solving the CHPED problem.

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