Unit Commitment with Ancillary Services in a Day-Ahead Power Market

This paper integrates Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO) and Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) to propose a DPSO-SQP method for solving unit commitment problems for ancillary services. Through analysis of ancillary services, including Automatic Generation Control (AGC), Real Spinning Reserve (RSR), and Supplemental Reserve (SR), the cost model of unit commitment was developed. With the requirements of energy balance, ancillary services, and operating constraints considered, DPSO-PSO was used to calculate the energy supply of each source, including the associated AGC, RSR, and SR, and the operating cost of a day-ahead power market was calculated. A study case using the real data from thermal units of Taipower Company (TPC) and Independent Power Producers (IPPs) demonstrated effective results for the “summer” and “non-summer” seasons, as classified by TPC for the two charging rates. According to the test cases in this research, costs without ancillary services in non-summer and summer seasons are higher than those with ancillary services. The simulation results are also compared with the Genetic Algorithm (GA), Evolutionary Programming (EP), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Simulated Annealing (SA). DPSO-PSO shows effectiveness in solving unit commitment problems with enhanced sorting efficiency, and a higher probability of reaching the global optimum