Price Based Unit Commitment Problem Under Deregulation

The profit based unit commitment problem involves determining the time intervals at which a particular generating unit should be online and available for generation, and the associated generation or dispatch, the aim being to maximize its total profits based on a given price profile. This problem can be attacked by various techniques like single unit dynamic programming, lagrangian relaxation, genetic algorithm; particle swarm optimization etc. this paper describes how a dynamic programming optimization method is used to solve this complex optimization problem. All the usual unit constraints like minimum up time, minimum down time, and ramp up, ramp down limits are considered, after which results for the chosen 26 generating units are presented, and discussed.