APPLICATION OF GENETIC ALGORITHM WITH LOCAL SEARCH IN OPTIMAL PIPING NETWORK DESIGN OF A DISTRICT COOLING SYSTEM

District cooling system (DCS) is a mass-scale production of chilled water generated at a central andremote chiller plant. Through an underground piping network, the chilled water is delivered to serve agroup of consumer buildings in a district area. DCS can offer both economical and environmentalbenefits. Because of the substantial capital investment and running energy involved, an optimal designof the distribution piping network is one of the crucial factors for successful implementation of thedistrict cooling scheme. However, it is impractical to evaluate the huge number of differentcombinations of piping configuration by exhaustive approach. In the present study, genetic algorithm(GA) was applied to find the optimal or near-optimal configuration of the piping network in ahypothetical district area. In order to improve the solution quality and computational efficiency of theoptimization process, a new local search technique was developed and incorporated into GA. Theresults are encouraging that the local search technique developed can search better solution in thevicinity of a current near-optimal solution. The details of the present study and the future work to befollowed are presented in this paper.