A comprehensive review of heuristic optimization algorithms for optimal combined heat and power dispatch from economic and environmental perspectives

Combined heat and power economic dispatch (CHPED) aims to minimize the operational cost of heat and power units satisfying several equality and inequality operational and power network constraints. The CHPED should be handled considering valve-point loading impact of the conventional thermal plants, power transmission losses of the system, generation capacity limits of the production units, and heat-power dependency constraints of the cogeneration units. Several conventional optimization algorithms have been firstly presented for providing the optimal production scheduling of power and heat generation units. Recently, experience-based algorithms, which are called heuristic and meta-heuristic optimization procedures, are introduced for solving the CHPED optimization problem. In this paper, a comprehensive review on application of heuristic optimization algorithms for the solution of CHPED problem is provided. In addition, the most popular heuristic and meta-heuristic optimization algorithms are studied in this paper, and implementation of the optimization procedures for the solution of CHPED problem taking into account the objective functions and different constrains are discussed. The main contributions of the reviewed papers are studied and discussed in details. Additionally, main considerations of equality and inequality constraints handled by different research studies are reported in this paper. Five test systems are considered for evaluating the performance of different optimization techniques. Optimal solutions obtained by employment of multiple heuristic and meta-heuristic optimization methods for test instances are demonstrated and the introduced methods are compared in terms of convergence speed, attained optimal solutions, and constrains. The best optimal solutions for five test systems are provided in terms of operational cost by employment of different optimization methods.