A Modified Imperialist Competitive Algorithm for Solving Profit Based Unit Commitment Problem

Deregulation of electric power market has changed traditional infrastructures of generation, transmission and distribution, drastically. In case of power generation, the classical unit ommitment that has been aimed to minimize operation costs, once; should be implemented by Generation companies (GENCOs) aiming at maximizing their own profit, now. In a novel price-based unit commitment (PBUC), constraint related to supplying the forecasted electricity demand is relaxed; while, it was a hard constraint in a cost-based unit commitment. In a restructured power market, system operators can utilize the PBUC to develop a successful bidding for participant generators. In such an environment, the signal that would enforce a unit to be in ON or OFF status would be the energy price, including the fuel purchase price and the energy sale. In this paper, a hybrid Imperialistic Competitive Algorithm (ICA) – Diversity Guided Evolutionary Algorithm (DGEA) approach is proposed to implement the PBUC problem. The proposed method is capable of aiding GENCOs to provide an optimal scheduling in order to sell some adequate amount of energy in the power market and subsequently, to reach maximum profit. The effectiveness of presented approach to overcome the complexity of non-convex optimization problem of PBUC is validated using a test system available in the literature.

Keywords:

Deregulation , Electricity Market , Profit Based Unit Commitment , Imperialistic Competitive Algorithm , Competitive Environment