Thermal Unit Commitment Solution using Priority List Method and Genetic-Imperialist Competitive Algorithm

A novel strategy including a Priority List (PL) based method and a heuristic algorithm which is named Genetic-Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (GICA) has been proposed in this paper to solve thermal Unit Commitment Problem (UCP). This problem has been confined by some constraints like minimum down time, minimum up time, spinning reserve, load demand, and limited output power of the generating units. The optimization process is carried out in three steps. At first, a strategy based PL is used to find units priority, in second step the GICA employed to solve Economic Load Dispatch (ELD), and finally a correction strategy tried to find and replace better solutions. The accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by two different case studies with 4 and 10 generation units system. The comparison of results with some other methods shows that proposed three step method has a better performance and achieve better solution in an admissible time interval