Five Phases Algorithm: A Novel Meta-heuristic Algorithm and Its Application on Economic Load Dispatch Problem

A new meta-heuristic algorithm named the five phases algorithm (FPA) is presented in this paper. The proposed method is inspired by the five phases theory in traditional Chinese thought. FPA updates agents based on the generating and overcoming strategy as well as learning strategy from the agent with the same label. FPA has a simple structure but excellent performance. It also does not have any predefined control parameters, only two general parameters including population size and terminal condition are required. This provides flexibility to users to solve different optimization problems. For global optimization, 10 test functions from the CEC2019 test suite are used to evaluate the performance of FPA. The experimental results confirm that FPA is better than the 6 state-of-the-art algorithms including particle swarm optimization (PSO), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), multi-verse optimizer (MVO), differential evolution (DE), backtracking search algorithm (BSA), and slime mould algorithm (SMA). Furthermore, FPA is applied to solve the Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) from the real power system problem. The experiments give that the minimum cost of power system operation obtained by the proposed FPA is more competitive than the 14 counterparts. The source codes of this algorithm can be found in https://ww2.mathworks.cn/matlabcentral/fileexchange/118215-five-phases-algorithm-fpa.