A conglomerated ion-motion and crisscross search optimizer for electric power load dispatch

Due to its simple concept, easy understanding, and coding, the ion-motion optimizer has become an attracting optimizer for researchers to solve real-world optimization problems. However, it is likely to suffer from premature convergence as it performs optimization only on the behalf of distance between best cation and anions or best anion and cations. To overcome this drawback, this paper proposes a conglomerated optimizer based on ion-motion and crisscross search optimizers to solve non-linear, discontinuous and constrained electric power load dispatch problem. In the proposed conglomerated optimizer, the liquid phase of ion-motion optimizer has been modified to improve the exploration of search space and the exploitation has been improved by the crisscross search. The performance of the proposed conglomerated optimizer has been investigated on both unconstrained benchmark functions and six variants of electric power load dispatch problem considering various practical constraints. The equality constraint of electric power load dispatch problem has been handled by a heuristic repair algorithm based on proportionate power sharing. The operation in prohibited operating zones has been avoided using a heuristic technique. The qualitative analysis of the results obtained by the proposed optimizer has been done by a Wilcoxon sign-rank test. The comparison of results in terms of minimum, average, maximum and standard deviation with the existing and recently published state-of-art optimizers reveals that the proposed conglomerated optimizer is a promising candidate for both unconstrained benchmark functions and electric power load dispatch problem problems. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.