1. Introduction
The main goal of power flow (PF) is to analyze the power system to obtain the voltage of all buses, losses at transmission lines, and the reactive power that has been injected on lines that satisfy the operation conditions. The optimization problem of optimal power flow (OPF) is large-scale, mixed-integer, extremely constrained, nonlinear, and nonconvex [
1]. Therefore, OPF is researched to optimize a specific objective while keeping to equality and inequality constraints. Four objective functions were considered: fuel cost (FC), emission (E), active power losses (APL), and voltage deviation (VD). The variables that can be adjusted to attain optimal objective functions include tap changer settings on transformers, real power output of generation units, voltage magnitude at PV bus, and reactive power injected by compensation sources. The formulation of the OPF problem was introduced by Dommel and Tinney [
2]. Gauss Seidel (GS) [
3], Newton Raphson (NR) [
4], and fast decoupled (FD) [
5] are the most popular numerical methods that have been proposed to solve PF equations.
There are two types of optimization algorithm that have been applied to solve OPF problems: traditional and metaheuristic optimization techniques. In traditional techniques, several methods have been performed to solve OPF problems, such as ε-constraint methods [
6], linear and nonlinear programming [
7], interior point method [
8], and quadratic programming [
9]. The drawbacks of these methods are multiple local minimum points, requirement of heavy computational cost, and slowness in convergence. Recently, metaheuristic optimization techniques were widely applied to solve large-scale problems in fields such as computer science, engineering, and business. The main aim of these optimization methods is to solve global optimization problems. Lately, many research papers have been published on applications of meta-heuristic optimization methods such as the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) [
10], the black widow optimization (BWO) [
11], the manta ray foraging optimization (MRFO) [
12], Henry gas solubility optimization (HGSO) [
13], etc. In power systems, metaheuristic optimization algorithms were proposed to solve OPF problems such as Modified Artificial Bee Colony (MABC) [
14], Spatio-temporal distribution (STD) [
15], differential evolution (DE) [
16], enhanced Particle Swarm optimization (EPSO) and Ant Lion optimization (ALO) [
17], improved differential evolution (IDE) [
18,
19], Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO) [
20,
21], and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) [
22]. The previous methods dealt with the problems of single-objective optimal power flow (SOOPF).
In multi-objective optimization, many metaheuristic optimization methods have been applied to solve MOOPF problems to provide a well-distributed Pareto solution set and offer a wide range of these solutions to decision-makers. For example, DE has been improved to solve SOOPF and integrated with Pareto concept optimization (PCO) to solve MOOPF, named MOIDEA [
23]. SMA has been proposed to solve SOOPF, and this algorithm has been developed to solve MOOPF with the considered case study of ISGHV [
24,
25]. Refs. [
26,
27] solves single and multi-objective OPF problems by combining the HGS with PCO using FMF and CD strategies to extract BCS and arrange the non-dominated solutions (NDSs). An improved decomposition-based method to solve MOOPF problems [
23]. Bee colony algorithms (BCA) have been improved to solve multi-objective dynamic OPF problems based on PCO [
28]. The authors in [
29] employed AMTPG-Jaya to solve MOOPF problems. HSA was applied to solve MOOPF problems [
30]. TLBO was combined with a quasi-opposition approach to enhance the quality and convergence characteristics of solutions [
31]. MOIICA was applied to solve MOOPF problems in the IEEE 30-bus [
32]. In [
33], M2OBA was proposed to solve MOOPF by considering fuel cost (FC), active power loss (APL), and emission (E) in the IEEE 30-bus test system. In [
34], MOEA-based decomposition (MOEA/D) was proposed to handle MOOPF. The objective functions (OFs) that were proposed are FC, VD, E, and APL, with seven cases studied on the IEEE 30 bus test system. Huy et al. [
35] introduced MOSGA to solve MOOPF problems on IEEE 30-bus and 57-bus systems by considering three objective functions, which are FC, E, and APL. Yuan et al. [
36] proposed ISPEA2 to solve MOOPF problems on IEEE 30-bus and 57-bus systems with two objective functions, FC and E. Three power system—IEEE 30-bus, IEEE 118-bus, and Indian Utility System 62-bus—were proposed to solve OPF problem using LISA Strategy-II algorithm with combined traditional thermal power generators, solar power coupled, and stochastic wind [
37].
The aim is to use hybridization of algorithms to achieve a balance between the exploration and exploitation phases of the research in the whole area. Many articles hybridize the GWO with other algorithms. For example, Meng et al. [
38] hybridized a hybrid algorithm based on crisscross search and the Grey Wolf Optimizer (CS-GWO) to solve OPF problems in the IEEE 30-bus system and the IEEE 118-bus system. In [
39], Grey Wolf Optimizer and cuckoo search (GWOCS) were presented. Qin et al. [
40] presented a new hybrid optimization method called HDGWO. Also, several articles have proposed hybridizing the HHO with other algorithms. Birogul [
41] combined Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO) with differential evolution (DE) to solve OPF problems on an IEEE 30-bus test system. Dhawale et al. [
42] presented a chaotic with Harris Hawks Optimization (CHHO) for solving engineering optimization problems.
In this article, OPF was applied to two IEEE standards, the IEEE 30-bus test system and the IEEE 57-bus test system, to achieve optimal objective functions while satisfying the constraints. Two metaheuristic optimization algorithms, Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) [
43] and Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO) [
44], were developed into multi-objective optimization methods to solve MOOPF problems. Pareto optimization [
45] was integrated with the proposed algorithms (GWO and HHO) to establish the developed approaches (MOGWO and MOHHO). Fuzzy membership function (FMF) and crowding distance (CD) strategies [
46] are the theories used to extract BCS and reduce and arrange the NDSs from Pareto front solutions.
This paper’s main novelty represents the use of new metaheuristic optimization techniques created by integrating analyzed algorithms (GWO and HHO) with Pareto concept optimization and using the characteristics of fuzzy membership function and crowding distance to generate a set of non-dominated solutions and draw the Pareto front that illustrates a good distribution. Therefore, creating new optimization techniques is vital, considering the massive expansion of electrical power systems. In addition, the increase in the number of OFs that can be solved simultaneously will lead to more complex and computational efforts to achieve the optimal Pareto front. These reasons lead to a need to explore new meta-heuristics optimization techniques capable of solving MOOPF problems and providing a set of non-dominated solutions and therefore good distribution of the Pareto front in power systems. This study is dedicated to overcoming challenges on original algorithms (GWO and HHO) by solving the multiple objective OPF problems.
In this work, the authors proved the ability of the developed approaches, MOGWO and MOHHO, to solve MOOPF problems. First, the control variables must be set to achieve the best multiple objective functions (FC, E, APL, and VD) simultaneously and find the optimal NDSs. Then, the authors used FNF to find BCS from NDS set. Finally, the CD is the strategy that was applied to select the best solutions in optimal NDSs. This strategy shows the distribution of optimal NDSs around an NDS. The developed approaches featured the ability for convergence speed, exploration, and exploitation. The main contributions can be summed up as follows:
The authors used two popular meta-heuristic optimization techniques, GWO and HHO, to address MOOPF problems and achieve technical, environmental, and economic benefits of power systems.
The method used to identify non-dominated Pareto front solutions is called Pareto concept optimization (PCO).
FMF is used to extract BCS, and the CD mechanism is used to choose the best solutions from all non-dominated Pareto front solutions.
With 21 case studies, two standard power systems—the IEEE 30-bus and the IEEE 57-bus—were used for multiple objective functions, including Bi, Triple, Quad, and Quinta.
The developed approaches, MOGWO and MOHHO, provided the best compromise solutions. These solutions were compared with other recent optimization techniques documented in the literature.
This paper is arranged as follows: The mathematical model of MOOPF is introduced in
Section 2.
Section 3 describes the multi-objective of the developed approaches. The numerical results, simulation, and discussion of developed approaches are demonstrated in
Section 4. The last section of this article is the conclusion.
3. Multi-Objective Meta-Heuristic Optimization Techniques
The proposed algorithms (GWO and HHO) are population iterative methods inspired by the cooperative behavior of gray wolves and Harris hawks. The proposed algorithms are effective in solving nonlinear, non-convex, and complex optimization problems. These algorithms are simple and do not need a lot of control parameters. It can be summarized as follows:
3.1. Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO)
The social behavior of the gray wolf is the inspiration for a new optimization technique called GWO. As illustrated in
Figure 1, Grey Wolf is classified into four groups according to leadership: alpha (α), beta (β), delta (δ), and omega (ω). The fitness of alpha gray represents the best fitness of all fitness. Beta (β) and delta (δ) will provide the second and third level of fitness. The remainder of the fitness can be represented by omega. The main procedures can be characterized as below:
3.1.1. Encircling
It can describe the mechanism of encircle as follows:
and represent the location of a grey wolf and prey, respectively. and denote the coefficient vectors. and are random vectors ranging from [0–1]. is the linear decrease between [2–0] over the iterations.
3.1.2. Hunting
The formula of this process can be expressed as follows:
3.1.3. Attacking
The attack process represents the last action of the GWO algorithm. This process will be performed when the prey has stopped moving. The mathematical formula of this process can be represented by gradually decreasing from [2–0].
3.1.4. Searching
The above process includes the exploration of the GWO algorithm. The wolves begin this process by searching for their prey based on where α, β, and δ wolves are located. There will be an attack by the convergence. The prey hunt is determined by the value of
. If the value of
B is more than 1, it needs to look for another prey. The flowchart of the GWO algorithm is illustrated in
Figure 2.
3.2. Harris Hawks Optimizer (HHO)
This optimization technique was based on population. HHO was proposed by Heidari et al. [
44]. The phases that are presented in this algorithm are exploration and exploitation. It can be described as follows:
3.2.1. Exploration
The exploration phase can be described as follows:
where
,
,
, and
are the position vectors of hawks, random, rabbit, and average. UB and LB denote the upper and lower bounds of variables.
is the number of hawks.
3.2.2. Transformation
This process represents the transformation from exploration to exploitation. The formula of this process can be described as follows:
and are the initial state and escaping energy, is the number of iterations.
3.2.3. Exploitation
According to the probability of escaping and its energy for the prey, four different scenarios were implemented. Attacks can be classified as either soft or hard besieges. The hard besiege is implemented if (r < 0.5) then (|| < 0.5), while the soft besiege occurs when (r ≥ 0.5) when (|| ≥ 0.5). The following are the stages of exploitation:
The mathematical model of this phase can be expressed as follows:
is the power of jumping for a rabbit during escaping.
- 2.
Hard besiege
The update on the prey position is as follows:
- 3.
Soft besiege with progressive rapid dives
A soft besiege will be executed by the hawks in preparation for increasingly rapid dives. This process will be executed when |
e| ≥ 0.5 and
r < 0.5. This process can be formulated as follows:
Diving hawks are represented by the levy flight function (
LF):
is the dimension of the problem and
is a random vector by size,
.
LF can be expressed as follows:
The update on the hawks position is as follows:
- 4.
Hard besiege with progressive rapid dives:
The condition to achieve this phase is when|
| < 0.5 and
r < 0.5. This phase can be described as follows:
Figure 3 illustrates the flowchart of HHO.
3.3. Pareto Concept Optimization (PCO)
3.3.1. Pareto Concept (PC)
The most popular method to obtain non-dominated solutions (NDSs) is the Pareto concept (PC). The equation used to prove the dominance of solution ×1 over solution ×2 is the following:
3.3.2. The Best Compromise Solution (BCS)
The calculation of BCS is the main objective for decision making. FMF is the technique used to find BCS [
49]. The steps of this technique can be summarized as follows:
- -
Determine the boundary of all objective functions ( and ).
- -
Calculate the membership function
for each objective as follows:
where
and
is the min. and max. values of NDSs. This equation represents the indicator for satisfaction for each OF to determine OFs in the range [1–0].
- -
To calculate the corresponding FMF of the non-dominated solutions (NDSs), it is as follows:
where
is to the FMF of each NDS.
is BCS, M is the number of Pareto solutions. Finally, the maximum membership function (
) is the best compromise solution (BCS).
Figure 4 represents the fuzzy membership function.
3.3.3. Crowding Distance (CD)
The method used to choose the best solutions from among all the non-dominated Pareto front solutions is called the crowding distance, or CD. The following equations were used to calculate the crowding distance:
where
denotes to the number of OFs,
and
are the max. and min. values obtained for OFs,
and
are the values for the
jth OF for
i + 1 and
i − 1. A lower CD value indicates a greater distributed set of solutions inside a given area. Since this parameter is determined in the objective spaces of multi-objective problems (MOPs), all NDSs must be categorized according to the values of one of the OFs. Calculating these parameters for every non-dominant solution is necessary. CD is calculated for all NDSs of all iteration. The solutions that have the highest CD values must be determined. Thus, NDSs from the non-dominated Pareto front (NDPF) are reduced and arranged using the CD technique. CD values represent the average distance between two neighboring NDSs. First, the fitness value of each OF should be calculated. These fitness values will be sorted in ascending order to determine the fitness with the infinite value. The corresponding diagonal length will be assigned to the remaining intermediate solutions. It can be represented by the diagonal length of the cuboid in
Figure 5.
3.4. Multi-Objective Grey Wolf Optimizer (MOGWO)
In this article, GWO was developed into MOGWO to solve MOOPF problems.
Figure 6 represents the flowchart of MOGWO. These critical phases are the two primary MOGWO operations (hunting and encircling), as was previously explained. GWO addresses the population in each generation of the evolutionary process. The new population W(t + 1) is the product of the encircling and hunting. Furthermore, a comparison will be made between W and W(t + 1). The Pareto dominance theory must be considered when comparing GWO to MOGWO. The following is a summary of the MOGWO phases:
Step 1: Initialization of system data (Max_ite, Max_pop, NDSs, control variables, etc. …).
Step 2: Compute the power flow of each GWO agent.
Step 3: Evaluate the weight factor of OFs of each GWO agent.
Step 4: Calculate , and
Step 5: Sort NDSs according to the weight factor of OFs of each population and save them in the repository.
Step 6: The position of search agent is updated via (15) and recalculate steps 3, 4, and 6.
Step 7: Integrate NDSs repositories of steps 5 and 6.
Step 8: Check the criteria (number of iterations or number of NDSs), if satisfied, go to step 9. Otherwise, return to step 3.
Step 9: Determine BCS from the NDSs.
3.5. Multi-Objective Harris Hawks Optimization (MOHHO)
Multi objective Harris Hawks Optimization (MOHHO) is the second approach that was applied for solving MOOPF problems (two or more OFs) and to optimize simultaneously. In
Figure 7, the MOHHO flowchart is shown. It is important to archive NDSs to generate the Pareto front sets. This archive is updated, and NDSs are removed with every iteration. Therefore, whenever the number of members in the Pareto archive exceeds the Pareto archive’s size, NDSs with the lowest CD values among the Pareto archive members are deleted. Because MOHHO uses long-distance solutions and focuses on near-optimal solutions, it has a lot of potential for use in the design space. Furthermore, by employing soft besiege, hard besiege, soft besiege with progressive rapid dives, and hard besiege with progressive rapid dives, respectively, the abilities of exploitation and exploration for the developed approach were improved. Generally, MOHHO begins with exploitation and progresses to exploration. However, in the first iteration, these motions function as a heuristic. The ability of the MOHHO to focus on the best NDSs while exploring a wide range of design space might be interpreted as this development. The steps below represent a summary of the main phases of MOHHO:
Step 1: Create the system data initial parameters.
Step 2: Create a random population matrix of HHO.
Step 3: Evaluate the weight factor of (OFs) of each population vector.
Step 4: Sort NDSs and save them in the HHO repository.
Step 5: Calculate the rabbit energy (E0).
Step 6: Update the energy rabbit using (17).
Step 7: Update the position of HHO agent and recalculate steps 3 and 4.
Step 8: Sort NDSs and save them in the HHO repository.
Step 9: Combine all NDSs (step 4 and 8) to find new NDSs.
Step 10: Check the criteria (number of iterations or number of NDSs), if satisfied, go to step 11. Otherwise, return to step 3.
Step 12: Determine the BCS from the NDSs.
5. Conclusions
In this study, the authors developed two popular meta-heuristic optimization techniques, Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) and Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO), to solve MOOPF problems. These techniques were named Multi-Objective GWO (MOGWO) and Multi-Objective HHO (MOHHO). Various conflicting objectives were optimized simultaneously, such as fuel cost, actual power losses, emission, and voltage deviation of all buses. Pareto concept optimization is the method that is integrated with the proposed algorithms to find Pareto front non-dominated solutions (PFNDSs). Fuzzy membership function (FMF) and crowding distance (CD) are the methods used to extract the best compromise solution (BCS) and arrange and improve the Pareto front solutions, respectively. The developed techniques MOGWO and MOHHO were proposed to find BCS of multiple conflicting OFs (Bi, Tri, Quad). Two different power systems—the IEEE 30-bus power system and the IEEE 57-bus power system, with 21 cases of various objective functions—were used to verify the performance of the proposed techniques, MOGWO and MOHHO. The best compromise solutions obtained by MOGWO and MOHHO confirmed the efficiency of the developed approaches in providing well-distributed Pareto-front non-dominated solutions. The best compromise solutions produced by the developed approaches were compared with other optimization techniques to show the effectiveness and superiority of the MOGWO and MOHHO approaches. The developed approaches provide a favorable performance and competitive optimizer to solve MOOPF problems in power systems. The conclusion from the simulation results can be summarized briefly as follows:
The proposed approaches (MOGWO and MOHHO) demonstrate efficient performance to solve MOOPF problems when applied to two standard power systems, IEEE 30-bus and IEEE 57-bus.
Compared with other new metaheuristic optimization techniques, the proposed approaches confirmed the superiority of these approaches to solve MOOPF problems.
The proposed approaches provide good distribution on the Pareto front and more balance for multiple objective OPF.
The standard power systems that were proposed, IEEE 30-bus and IEEE 57-bus, provide high performance in solving MOOPF problems.
Due to the limited number of pages, more improvements cannot be made to cover different OPF problems.
This study is limited to addressing conventional power systems, such as IEEE 30-bus and IEEE 57-bus, and may not necessarily be applied to other systems.
The comparison is unfair because it does not include all algorithms; maybe other algorithms not listed in this paper have the best results.
Some parameters may affect the final results when applied to other systems.
Future research can employ the proposed methods MOGWO and MOHHO to solve MOOPF problems with more complex power systems and control variables such as IEEE 118-bus and IEEE 300-bus systems. The techniques that were developed can also be employed to address more problems with optimization with such sizing to include FACTS devices, distributed generation, and renewable energy sources in power systems, as well as economic dispatch and optimal location.