Combined Heat and Power Economic Dispatch Based on Neighborhood Differential Evolution Algorithm with Hybrid Mutation

Combined heat and power economic dispatch (CHPED) can improve the utilization efficiency of waste heat while reducing energy consumption, which serves as an important approach to energy saving and consumption reduction in power systems. However, CHPED is a complex and strongly coupled nonlinear optimization problem. Particularly, after considering the valve-point effect, which exhibits a high degree of non-convexity, it is prone to falling into the local optima. To effectively address the CHPED problem, a hybrid variational neighborhood differential evolution algorithm is proposed. On the one hand, the neighborhood technique is employed to define the search space of individuals. Subsequently, individuals are restricted to searching and evolving in their respective neighborhood space to prevent the algorithm from converging prematurely to the local optimum. On the other hand, the hybrid variation contains two strategies: the first one uses the random individuals in the neighborhood to guide the individual evolution to maintain the diversity, while the second one uses the optimal individuals in the neighborhood to guide individual evolution to ensure the algorithm convergence, and the two strategies can be adjusted according to the evolution state of the population to meet the optimization requirements of different solution phases. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm converges faster than other algorithms, and the solution exhibits greater stability, thereby exhibiting significant superiority.