Developing a Harmony-based Optimization Toolbox: Application on renewable energy production.

The present study aims to develop a problem-independent, generic optimization toolkit applicable to engineering optimization problems. The authors designed a program in MATLAB environment, using a Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) in its core. A Java-based Optimization Toolkit has also been developed, taking advantage of the inherent features of object-oriented Java. Both programs allow for optimization using the HSA, which is a recent development among metaheuristics, inspired from the music creation process. Since its presentation in 2001, HSA has attracted the interest of those involved in the optimization field and thus has been successfully applied in different implementations. HSA was initially designed to optimize urban water distribution networks. Since then its application has expanded to a remarkably wide range of scientific disciplines. Although the authors’ intention is to address water engineering, hydroelectric energy production and renewable energy related problems, the created tool is generic and can be applied to any scientific field. In section 2 the authors present the up-to-date related work i.e. recent approaches in developing tools to facilitate optimization processes. The architecture of both Toolkits is presented in detail along with the main characteristics of the programs in Section 3. In Section 4 a renewable energy production problem is optimized using HSA Toolkit. This problem deals with maximizing the benefits derived from electricity production of a mini-scale hydroelectric station in a rural area. The successful convergence to best management practices proves that in addition to being user-friendly, the created tool is also very effective.

KOUGIAS Ioannis;  KARAKATSANIS Diamantis;  MALATRAS Apostolos;  THEODOSSIOU Nicolaos; 

2014-11-17

National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)

JRC88482

9789609999465,   

http://www.opti2014.org/,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC88482,