A hybrid approach based on PSO and EP for proficient solving of Unit Commitment Problem

Unit Commitment Problem (UCP) is a nonlinear mixed integer optimization problem used in the scheduling operation of power system generating units subjected to demand and reserve requirement constraints for achieving minimum operating cost. The task of the UC problem is to determine the on/off state of the generating units at every hour interval of the planning period for optimally transmitting the load and reserve among the committed units. The importance for the necessity of a more effective optimal solution to the UCP problem is increasing with the regularly varying demand. Hereby, we propose a hybrid approach which solves the unit commitment problem subjected to necessary constraints and gives the optimal commitment of the units. The possible combination of demand and their corresponding optimal generation schedule can be determined by the PSO algorithm. Being a global optimization technique, Evolutionary Programming (EP) for solving Unit Commitment Problem, operates on a method, which encodes each unit's operating schedule with respect to up/down time. When the demand over a time horizon is given as input to the network it successfully gives the schedule of each unit's commitment that satisfies the demands of all the periods and results in minimum total cost.