An ICA based approach for solving profit based unit commitment problem under restructured power market

With the advent of paralleling and implementation of restructuring in the power market, some routine rules and patterns of traditional market should be accomplished in a way different from the past. To this end, the unit commitment (UC) scheduling that has once been aimed at minimizing operating costs in an integrated power market, is metamorphosed to profit based unit commitment (PBUC) by adopting a new schema, in which generation companies (GENCOs) have a common tendency to maximize their own profit. In this paper, a novel optimization technique called imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) as well as an improved version of this evolutionary algorithm are employed for solving the PBUC problem. Moreover, traditional binary approach of coding of initial solutions is replaced with an improved integer based coding method in order to reduce computational complexity and subsequently ameliorate convergence procedure of the proposed method. Then, a sub-ICA algorithm is proposed to obtain optimal generation power of thermal units. Simulation results validate effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method on two scenarios: (a) a set of unimodal and multimodal standard benchmark functions, (b) two GENCOs consist of 10 and 100 generating units. © 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.