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

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