The ε constrained differential evolution approach for optimal operational planning of energy plants

This paper introduces optimal operational planning of energy plants via the ε constrained differential evolution. In order to generate optimal operational planning for energy plants, startup/shutdown status and/or input/output values of the facilities at each control interval should be determined. The problem can be formulated as a large-scale mixed-integer nonlinear problem (MINLP). Metaheuristics (MHs) is one of the solutions for MINLP. If the formulated MINLP has various equality and inequality constraints, it remains difficult to solve it without parameters tuning. In this paper, to overcome the difficulty, we propose an improved differential evolution approach using the ε constrained method for MINLP. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with conventional methods.