An Improved Chaotic Bat Algorithm for Daily Electrical Scheduling of Hydrothermal Energy Systems

Abstract

Minimizing the cost of operation has always been the objective of power generation companies. Electrical scheduling of hydrothermal energy systems deals with minimizing the cost of thermal generation while taking care of various hydraulic and thermal constraints. Due to the non- convex and non linear nature of the problem, meta-heuristic techniques are preferred over the classical techniques. This paper presents the improved version of bat algorithm in order to solve the stated problem. The proposed technique tackles the problem of premature convergence by embedding the chaotic hybridized local search in basic bat algorithm. The complex constraints, like dynamic water balance, are handled using heuristic tools instead of any penalty factor approach. In order to test the efficiency of the developed technique it was applied on three hydrothermal test systems. The proposed methodology produces encouraging results as compared to many other recently established approaches.