Eagle Strategy based Crow Search Algorithm for solving Unit Commitment Problem

Eagle strategy is a two-stage optimization strategy, which is inspired by the observation of the hunting behavior of eagles in nature. In this two-stage strategy, the first stage explores the search space globally by using a Levy flight; if it finds a promising solution, then an intensive local search is employed using a more efficient local optimizer, such as hillclimbing and the downhill simplex method. Then, the two-stage process starts again with new global exploration, followed by a local search in a new region. One of the remarkable advantages of such a combina-tion is to use a balanced tradeoff between global search (which is generally slow) and a rapid local search. The crow search algorithm (CSA) is a recently developed metaheuristic search algorithm inspired by the intelligent behavior of crows.This research article integrates the crow search algorithm as a local optimizer of Eagle strategy to solve unit commitment (UC) problem. The Unit commitment problem (UCP) is mainly finding the minimum cost schedule to a set of generators by turning each one either on or off over a given time horizon to meet the demand load and satisfy different operational constraints. There are many constraints in unit commitment problem such as spinning reserve, minimum up/down, crew, must run and fuel constraints. The proposed strategy ES-CSA is tested on 10 to 100 unit systems with a 24-h scheduling horizon. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is compared with other well-known evolutionary, heuristics and meta-heuristics search algorithms, and by reported numerical results, it has been found that proposed strategy yields global results for the solution of the unit commitment problem.