Optimal Planning of a Multi-carrier Energy Hub Using the Modified Bird Mating Optimizer

The optimal expansion planning (OEP) is considered as a mathematical problem that aims to find the optimal combination of different generators, energy devices, and transmission lines based on a specific objective function. This problem has been extensively studied for many years. This paper investigates an approach for OEP for a single energy hub with different energy infrastructures including electricity, gas, and heating systems. It is assumed that the hub consists of a transformer and variable numbers of combined heat and power units (CHPs) and furnaces that are responsible for providing electricity and heat loads during a given time period. The hub also receives wood chips, natural gas, and electricity as its input. Both total energy cost and emission (air pollution) are used as the objective of the optimization problem. Unscented transformation is applied for modeling the uncertainty and the correlation between heat and electricity loads. The problem is modeled first as a constrained optimization problem and then converted to an unconstrained problem using the Lagrange method. The modified bird mating optimizer is utilized to solve the optimization problem which led to optimal values of input powers and also optimum number of equipment (e.g., furnace and CHP).