Publication

Abstract : Unit Commitment (UC) and Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) problems are significant research areas to determine the economical generation schedule with all generating unit constraints, such as unit ramp rates, unit minimum and maximum generation capabilities and minimum up-time and down-time. This study proposed a technique for solving the UC and ELD problems using bio-inspired techniques like Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) Optimization. The experiments are performed in two phases: UC phase and ELD phase. In the UC phase, a turn-on and turn-off schedule for a given combination of generating units is performed using GA, thus satisfying a set of dynamic operational constraints. During the second ELD phase, the pre-committed schedules are optimized and the optimal load is distributed among the scheduled units using ABC algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is investigated on two test systems namely, IEEE 30 bus system and ten unit system. Experimental results prove that the proposed method is capable of yielding higher quality solution including mathematical simplicity, fast convergence, diversity maintenance, robustness and scalability for the complex UC-ELD problem.