Minimizing electricity fuel cost of thermal generating units by using improved firefly algorithm

This paper presents the application of an improved firefly algorithm (IFA) for minimizing total electricity generation fuel cost while all loads are supplied by thermal generating units. The proposed IFA was developed by combining two proposed improvements of the firefly algorithm (FA), i.e. improvement of the distance between two considered solutions and improvement of the new-solution production technique. The effect of each proposed improvement on the conventional firefly algorithm (FA) and the performance of IFA were investigated in two study cases, i.e. single- and multi-fuel option based thermal generating units. In the first case, three different systems with three, six and twenty units were employed, while a ten-unit system with four different loads was tested in the second case. The comparison results between IFA and existing methods, including three other FA variants, revealed that the two proposed improvements of FA are very efficient and make IFA a very promising meta-heuristic algorithm for minimizing fuel cost of thermal generating units.