Thermal Unit Commitment Scheduling Problem in Utility System by Simulated Annealing Embedded Evolutionary Programming Method

This paper presents a new approach to solving the short-term thermal unit commitment scheduling problem in utility system using Simulated Annealing Embedded Evolutionary Programming Method. The objective of this paper is to find the generation scheduling such that the total operating cost can be minimized, when subjected to a variety of constraints. A 7-Unit utility power system with twelve generating units in India demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach; extensive studies have also been performed for different IEEE test systems consist of 10, 26 and 34 Units. Numerical results are shown comparing the cost solutions and computation time obtained by using the Evolutionary Programming method and other conventional methods like Dynamic Programming, Legrangian Relaxation and Simulated Annealing in reaching proper unit commitment.