Evaluation of different initial solution algorithms to be used in the heuristics optimization to solve the energy resource scheduling in smart grids

Over the last years, an increasing number of distributed resources have been connected to the power system due to the ambitious environmental targets, which resulted into a more complex operation of the power system. In the future, an even larger number of resources is expected to be coupled which will turn the day-ahead optimal resource scheduling problem into an even more difficult optimization problem. Under these circumstances, metaheuristics can be used to address this optimization problem. An adequate algorithm for generating a good initial solution can improve the metaheuristic's performance of finding a final solution near to the optimal than using a random initial solution. This paper proposes two initial solution algorithms to be used by a metaheuristic technique (simulated annealing). These algorithms are tested and evaluated with other published algorithms that obtain initial solution. The proposed algorithms have been developed as modules to be more flexible their use by other metaheuristics than just simulated annealing. The simulated annealing with different initial solution algorithms has been tested in a 37-bus distribution network with distributed resources, especially electric vehicles. The proposed algorithms proved to present results very close to the optimal with a small difference between 0.1%. A deterministic technique is used as comparison and it took around 26 h to obtain the optimal one. On the other hand, the simulated annealing was able of obtaining results around 1 min. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.