Ant Lion Optimizer for Solving Unit Commitment Problem in Smart Grid System

This paper proposed the integration of solar energy resources into the conventional unit commitment. The growing concern about the depletion of fossil fuels increased the awareness on the importance of renewable energy resources, as an alternative energy resources in unit commitment operation. However, the present renewable energy resources is intermitted due to unpredicted photovoltaic output. Therefore, Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO) is proposed to solve unit commitment problem in smart grid system with consideration of uncertainties .ALO is inspired by the hunting appliance of ant lions in natural surroundings. A 10-unit system with the constraints, such as power balance, spinning reserve, generation limit, minimum up and down time constraints are considered to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. The performance of proposed algorithm are compared with the performance of Dynamic Programming (DP). The results show that the integration of solar energy resources in unit commitment scheduling can improve the total operating cost significantly.