Solving unit commitment and economic load dispatch problems using modern optimization algorithms

Abstract

Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) and Unit Commitment (UC) are very important applications to predict the optimized cost of load in a power system. UC determines working states for existing generating units under some operational constraints and then optimizing the operation cost for all running units w.r.t. load demand using economic dispatch. This paper introduces Genetic Algorithm (GA) or Dynamic Programming (DP) to solve UC and then Shuffled BAT (BAT) technique as an evolutionary based approach is presented to solve the constrained ELD problem of thermal plants depending on the results obtained from UC solution. The IEEE 30 bus system is used to test the demonstration of the solution quality, computation efficiency and the feasibility of the application of BAT algorithm for ELD problem.

Keywords: Unit Commitment, Economic load dispatch, Dynamic Programming, Genetic Algorithm, Shuffled BAT, IEEE 30 bus system