Operation planning of district heating and cooling plants using genetic algorithms for mixed 0-1 linear programming

In this paper, we formulate the operation planning of a district heating and cooling plant as a mixed 0-1 linear programming problem. Since the formulated problem involves hundreds of variables, we anticipate that it is difficult to obtain a strict optimal solution to the problem. Thereby, we propose an approximate solution method based on genetic algorithms. Furthermore, we investigate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method by applying it and the branch-and-bound method to an operation planning problem of an actual district heating and cooling plant.