We encounter optimization problems in our daily lives and in various research domains. Some of them are so hard that we can, at best, approximate the best solutions with (meta-) heuristic methods. However, the huge number of optimization problems and the small number of generally acknowledged methods mean that more metaheuristics are needed to fill the gap. We propose a new metaheuristic, called chemical reaction optimization (CRO), to solve optimization problems. It mimics the interactions of molecules in a chemical reaction to reach a low energy stable state. We tested the performance of CRO with three nondeterministic polynomial-time hard combinatorial optimization problems. Two of them were traditional benchmark problems and the other was a real-world problem. Simulation results showed that CRO is very competitive with the few existing successful metaheuristics, having outperformed them in some cases, and CRO achieved the best performance in the real-world problem. Moreover, with the No-Free-Lunch theorem, CRO must have equal performance as the others on average, but it can outperform all other metaheuristics when matched to the right problem type. Therefore, it provides a new approach for solving optimization problems. CRO may potentially solve those problems which may not be solvable with the few generally acknowledged approaches.

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 recharge 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 recharged. Based on these new perspectives, we formulate the EV charging station placement problem (EVCSPP) in this paper. We prove that the problem is nondeterministic 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.

Fault detection is essential in microgrid control and operation, as it enables the system to perform fast fault isolation and recovery. The adoption of inverter-interfaced distributed generation in microgrids makes traditional fault detection schemes inappropriate due to their dependence on significant fault currents. In this paper, we devise an intelligent fault detection scheme for microgrid based on wavelet transform and deep neural networks. The proposed scheme aims to provide fast fault type, phase, and location information for microgrid protection and service recovery. In the scheme, branch current measurements sampled by protective relays are pre-processed by discrete wavelet transform to extract statistical features. Then all available data is input into deep neural networks to develop fault information. Compared with previous work, the proposed scheme can provide significantly better fault type classification accuracy. Moreover, the scheme can also detect the locations of faults, which are unavailable in previous work. To evaluate the performance of the proposed fault detection scheme, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation study on the CERTS microgrid and IEEE 34-bus system. The simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme in terms of detection accuracy, computation time, and robustness against measurement uncertainty.

Online identification of postcontingency transient stability is essential in power system control, as it facilitates the grid operator to decide and coordinate system failure correction control actions. Utilizing machine learning methods with synchrophasor measurements for transient stability assessment has received much attention recently with the gradual deployment of wide-area protection and control systems. In this paper, we develop a transient stability assessment system based on the long short-term memory network. By proposing a temporal self-adaptive scheme, our proposed system aims to balance the trade-off between assessment accuracy and response time, both of which may be crucial in real-world scenarios. Compared with previous work, the most significant enhancement is that our system learns from the temporal data dependencies of the input data, which contributes to better assessment accuracy. In addition, the model structure of our system is relatively less complex, speeding up the model training process. Case studies on three power systems demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed transient stability as sessment system.

Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) is a recently established metaheuristics for optimization, inspired by the nature of chemical reactions. A chemical reaction is a natural process of transforming the unstable substances to the stable ones. In microscopic view, a chemical reaction starts with some unstable molecules with excessive energy. The molecules interact with each other through a sequence of elementary reactions. At the end, they are converted to those with minimum energy to support their existence. This property is embedded in CRO to solve optimization problems. CRO can be applied to tackle problems in both the discrete and continuous domains. We have successfully exploited CRO to solve a broad range of engineering problems, including the quadratic assignment problem, neural network training, multimodal continuous problems, etc. The simulation results demonstrate that CRO has superior performance when compared with other existing optimization algorithms. This tutorial aims to assist the readers in implementing CRO to solve their problems. It also serves as a technical overview of the current development of CRO and provides potential future research directions.

Advancements in sensing and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies generate a huge amount of data. Mobility on demand (MoD) service benefits from the availability of big data in the intelligent transportation system. Given the future travel demand or origin-destination (OD) flows prediction, service providers can pre-allocate unoccupied vehicles to the customers' origins of service to reduce waiting time. Traditional approaches on future travel demand and the OD flows predictions rely on statistical or machine learning methods. Inspired by deep learning techniques for image and video processing, through regarding localized travel demands as image pixels, a novel deep learning model called multi-scale convolutional long short-term memory network (MultiConvLSTM) is developed in this paper. Rather than using the traditional OD matrix which may lead to loss of geographical information, we propose a new data structure, called OD tensor to represent OD flows, and a manipulation method, called OD tensor permutation and matricization, is introduced to handle the high dimensionality features of OD tensor. MultiConvLSTM considers both temporal and spatial correlations to predict the future travel demand and OD flows. Experiments on real-world New York taxi data of around 400 million records are performed. Our results show that the MultiConvLSTM achieves the highest accuracy in both one-step and multiple-step predictions and it outperforms the existing methods for travel demand and OD flow predictions.