A New Heuristic Method for Solving Unit Commitment Problem in Competitive Environment

In a restructured power market, traditionalscheduling of generating units needs modification. The classicalunit commitment problem aims at minimizing the operationcosts by satisfying the forecasted electricity load. However,under new structure, Generation companies (GENCOs)schedule their generators with an objective to maximize theirown profit by relaxation of the demand fulfillment constraintand without any regard for system social profit, to match thecompetitive market. A Unit Commitment algorithm withcapability of profit maximization plays a significant role insuccessful development bidding strategies of a competitivegenerator. In such an environment, power price turns into animportant factor in decision process. In this paper the authorsutilized a new heuristic technique called ImperialisticCompetitive Algorithm (ICA) to exert Profit Based UnitCommitment (PBUC) problem. In fact, the presented approachassists GENCOs to make a decision, how to schedule generatorsin order to gain the maximum profit by selling adequateamounts of power in power market. The effectiveness of theproposed method to solve generation scheduling optimizationproblem in a day-ahead deregulated electricity market isvalidated on 10 generating unit systems available in theliterature. Comparison of results obtained from simulationverifies the ability of proposed method.