Article ID: | iaor20033178 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 121 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 33 |
End Page Number: | 55 |
Publication Date: | Jul 2003 |
Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
Authors: | Ragsdale Cliff T., Bergey Paul K., Hoskote Mangesh |
Keywords: | optimization: simulated annealing, decision theory: multiple criteria |
Due to a variety of political, economic, and technological factors, many national electricity industries around the globe are transforming from non-competitive monopolies with centralized systems to decentralized operations with competitive business units. A key challenge faced by energy restructuring specialists at the World Bank is trying to simultaneously optimize the various criteria one can use to judge the fairness and commercial viability of a particular power districting plan. This research introduces and tests a new algorithm for solving the electrical power districting problem in the context of the Republic of Ghana and using a random test problem generator. We show that our mimetic algorithm, the Simulated Annealing Genetic Algorithm, outperforms a well-known Parallel Simulated Annealing heuristic on this new and interesting problem manifested by the deregulation of electricity markets.