Title: A genetic algorithm to solve the thermal unit commitment problem

Authors: Yacine Labbi; Djilani Benattous

Addresses: The Electrical Engineering Department, El-Oued University, P.O. Box 568, 39000, El-Oued, Algeria, Algeria ' The Electrical Engineering Department, El-Oued University, P.O. Box 568, 39000, El-Oued, Algeria, Algeria

Abstract: In this paper, a genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to solve the thermal unit commitment (UC) problem. The objective of UC is to determine the optimal generation of the committed units to meet the load demand and spinning reserve at each time interval, such that the overall cost of generation is minimised, while satisfying different operational constraints. The results obtained show that, with the application of the proposed method (GA) to the unit commitment problem, better convergences and solutions are obtained than with other metaheuristic algorithms.

Keywords: electrical power generation; genetic algorithms; metaheuristics; optimisation; thermal unit commitment; load demand; spinning reserve.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPEC.2014.065511

International Journal of Power and Energy Conversion, 2014 Vol.5 No.4, pp.344 - 360

Received: 16 Nov 2013
Accepted: 10 Jan 2014
Published online: 25 Apr 2015 *

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