On the convergence of chemical reaction optimization for combinatorial optimization

A novel general-purpose optimization method, chemical reaction optimization (CRO), is a population-based metaheuristic inspired by the phenomenon of interactions between molecules in a chemical reaction process. CRO has demonstrated its competitive edge over existing methods in solving many real-world problems. However, all studies concerning CRO have been empirical in nature and no theoretical analysis has been conducted to study its convergence properties. In this paper, we present some convergence results for several generic versions of CRO, each of which adopts different combinations of elementary reactions. We investigate the limiting behavior of CRO. By modeling CRO as a finite absorbing Markov chain, we show that CRO converges to a global optimum solution with a probability arbitrarily close to one when time tends to infinity. Our results also show that the convergence of CRO is determined by both the elementary reactions and the total energy of the system. Moreover, we also study and discuss the finite time behavior of CRO. © 1997-2012 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Electric Vehicle Charging Station Placement: Formulation, Complexity, and Solutions

To enhance environmental sustainability, many countries will electrify their transportation systems in their future smart city plans. So the number of electric vehicles (EVs) running in a city will grow significantly. There are many ways to re-charge EVs' batteries and charging stations will be considered as the main source of energy. The locations of charging stations are critical; they should not only be pervasive enough such that an EV anywhere can easily access a charging station within its driving range, but also widely spread so that EVs can cruise around the whole city upon being re-charged. Based on these new perspectives, we formulate the Electric Vehicle Charging Station Placement Problem (EVCSPP) in this paper. We prove that the problem is non-deterministic polynomial-time hard. We also propose four solution methods to tackle EVCSPP and evaluate their performance on various artificial and practical cases. As verified by the simulation results, the methods have their own characteristics and they are suitable for different situations depending on the requirements for solution quality, algorithmic efficiency, problem size, nature of the algorithm, and existence of system prerequisite.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, revise

Optimal V2G scheduling of electric vehicles and unit commitment using chemical reaction optimization

An electric vehicle (EV) may be used as energy storage which allows the bi-directional electricity flow between the vehicle's battery and the electric power grid. In order to flatten the load profile of the electricity system, EV scheduling has become a hot research topic in recent years. In this paper, we propose a new formulation of the joint scheduling of EV and Unit Commitment (UC), called EVUC. Our formulation considers the characteristics of EVs while optimizing the system total running cost. We employ Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), a general-purpose optimization algorithm to solve this problem and the simulation results on a widely used set of instances indicate that CRO can effectively optimize this problem. © 2013 IEEE.published_or_final_versio