Application of Dynamically Search Space Squeezed Modified Firefly Algorithm to a Novel Short Term Economic Dispatch of Multi-Generation Systems

The absence of the global best component in the update equation of the conventional firefly algorithm degrades its exploration properties. This research proposes multi-update position criteria to enhance the exploration properties of the conventional firefly technique while including the effect of the global best solution on the movement of the fireflies in the search space of the objective function. Moreover, the dynamic search space squeezing is applied to constrict the movement of the fireflies within the certain limits to avoid their oscillatory movement as the solution approaches towards the global best by determining the optimal trajectory for each firefly. The robustness of the suggested firefly algorithm is tested on a hybrid energy system consisting of thermal, hydroelectric, and Photovoltaic (PV) energy source. The intermittent nature of the PV energy source is explained using fractional integral polynomial model and Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model. The main dispatch problem is successfully computed using both the modified firefly and the simple firefly algorithm by determining the optimal power share of each energy source for different scheduling intervals. The suggested operational strategy reduces the overall generation cost of the system while preserving the various system constraints. Due to the stochastic nature of the meta-heuristic techniques, the two suggested algorithms are compared statistically for different test cases using the independent t-test results. The statistical comparison suggests that the performance of the modified firefly is superior to its conventional counterpart as the evaluation parameters of the modified firefly converge to relatively lower value as compared to the parameters of the simple firefly algorithm.