Abstract
This article suggests a novel enhanced slime mould optimizer (ESMO) that incorporates a chaotic strategy and an elitist group for handling various mathematical optimization benchmark functions and engineering problems. In the newly suggested solver, a chaotic strategy was integrated into the movement updating rule of the basic SMO, whereas the exploitation mechanism was enhanced via searching around an elitist group instead of only the global best dependence. To handle the mathematical optimization problems, 13 benchmark functions were utilized. To handle the engineering optimization problems, the optimal power flow (OPF) was handled first, where three studied cases were considered. The suggested scheme was scrutinized on a typical IEEE test grid, and the simulation results were compared with the results given in the former publications and found to be competitive in terms of the quality of the solution. The suggested ESMO outperformed the basic SMO in terms of the convergence rate, standard deviation, and solution merit. Furthermore, a test was executed to authenticate the statistical efficacy of the suggested ESMO-inspired scheme. The suggested ESMO provided a robust and straightforward solution for the OPF problem under diverse goal functions. Furthermore, the combined heat and electrical power dispatch problem was handled by considering a large-scale test case of 84 diverse units. Similar findings were drawn, where the suggested ESMO showed high superiority compared with the basic SMO and other recent techniques in minimizing the total production costs of heat and electrical energies.