Unit commitment scheduling using particle swarm optimization

An important criterion in power system operation is to meet the power demand at minimum fuel cost using an optimal mix of different power plants. Moreover, in order to supply electric power to customers in a secured and economic manner, thermal unit commitment is considered to be one of the best available options. It is thus recognized that the optimal unit commitment of thermal systems results in a great saving for electric utilities. Unit Commitment is the problem of determining the schedule of generating units subject to device and operating constraints. The formulation of unit commitment has been discussed and an algorithm based on Particle Swarm Optimization technique, which is a population based global search, has been developed to solve the unit commitment problem. The algorithms which was written in MATLAB codes was implemented on IEEE six bus system. The results showed that PSO is effective in producing optimal solution for UC problem with minimised operating cost within 45 minute execution time