Title: Unit commitment - a survey and comparison of conventional and nature inspired algorithms

Authors: Rammohan Mallipeddi; Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam Suganthan

Addresses: School of Electronics Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, 702 701, South Korea ' School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 639 798, Singapore

Abstract: Unit commitment problem (UCP) which has a significant influence on secure and economic operation of power systems is considered to be one of the most difficult optimisation problems due to the number/type of variables and constraints present. To provide quality solutions to UCP several solution methodologies that include deterministic and stochastic search algorithms have been proposed. Deterministic and stochastic algorithms have their own share of advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, we provide a literature survey on the algorithms developed for UCP and try to compare their performance on some standard benchmark problems by taking the results from the literature. The literature survey along with the performance comparison will be useful for the researchers in the area of power engineering.

Keywords: unit commitment; deterministic algorithms; particle swarm optimisation; PSO; ant colony optimisation; ACO; bacterial foraging; differential evolution; evolutionary algorithms; genetic algorithms; firefly algorithms; harmony search; simulated annealing; bio-inspired computation; power engineering; power systems; literature review; performance comparison.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIC.2014.060609

International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, 2014 Vol.6 No.2, pp.71 - 90

Received: 01 Mar 2013
Accepted: 22 Jan 2014
Published online: 27 Sep 2014 *

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