Turbulent Flow of Water-Based Optimization for Solving Multi-Objective Technical and Economic Aspects of Optimal Power Flow Problems

The optimal operation of modern power systems aims at achieving the increased power demand requirements regarding economic and technical aspects. Another concern is preserving the emissions within the environmental limitations. In this regard, this paper aims at finding the optimal scheduling of power generation units that are able to meet the load requirements based on a multi-objective optimal power flow framework. In the proposed multi-objective framework, objective functions, technical economical, and emissions are considered. The solution methodology is performed based on a developed turbulent flow of a water-based optimizer (TFWO). Single and multi-objective functions are employed to minimize the cost of fuel, emission level, power losses, enhance voltage deviation, and voltage stability index. The proposed algorithm is tested and investigated on the IEEE 30-bus and 57-bus systems, and 17 cases are studied. Four additional cases studied are applied on four large scale test systems to prove the high scalability of the proposed solution methodology. Evaluation of the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed TFWO is proven through a comparison of the simulation results, convergence rate, and statistical indices to other well-known recent algorithms in the literature. We concluded from the current study that TFWO is efficient, effective, robust, and superior in solving OPF optimization problems. It has better convergence rates compared with other well-known algorithms with significant technical and economical improvements. A reduction in the range of 4.6–33.12% is achieved by the proposed TFWO for the large scale tested system. For the tested system, the proposed solution methodology leads to a more competitive solution with significant improvement in the techno-economic aspects.