Economic Dispatch of Combined Heat and Power Systems using Particle Swarm Optimization

Due to the limitations and high cost of fossil fuel energy sources, combined heat and power units (CHPs) are gaining more attention recently as they are more efficient and less pollutant than conventional sources. In order to use CHP units more efficiently, the economic dispatch problem (EDP) is applied to obtain the optimal power and heat sources’ outputs to satisfy heat and power demands while meeting the different operational constraints. The problem is nonlinear and non-convex which requires heuristic technique to be used to solve this complex problem. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is utilized due to its effectiveness in solving complex problems due to its high convergence speed with less number of iterations. The EDP main objective is to obtain optimal output power and heat of each unit while the total generation cost is minimized. The obtained results justify the superiority of the proposed method in solving such complicated problems.