Combined heat and power economic dispatch by improved ant colony search algorithm

The difficulty of solving combined heat and power (CHP) economic dispatch lies in the constraints imposed by the multi-objectives. The mutual dependencies of heat-power capacity make it hard to find a feasible region, not to mention the optimum. This paper presents a novel ant colony search algorithm (ACSA) approach for this problem. The main characteristics of the ACSA are positive feedback, distributed computation and the use of a constructive greedy heuristic. Positive feedback accounts for the rapid discovery of good solutions, distributed computation avoids premature convergence, and the greedy heuristic helps to find acceptable solutions in the early stages of the search process. However, despite the attraction of the ACSA's potential search ability, there are still some difficulties, such as the handling of constraints and premature convergence. This paper proposes to couple the ACSA with other search techniques to improve its performance. The numerical results reported are encouraging. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.