Biogeography Based Optimization for Unit Commitment with Wind Farms

The impact of human activities on the environment as a consequence of the industrialization process, the rising trend of the price of fossil fuels, and the incentives offered by governments in many countries have driven the development and evolution of renewable energy sources such as wind energy. The optimal selection of on-line units and optimal output levels of committed units for conventional generation need to be revised taking into account the impact of wind farms. This paper presents a new methodology for unit commitment (UC) with wind farms using biogeography based optimization (BBO). The proposed method divides the UC problem into several subproblems, each representing an UC problem of an interval, and solves the each sub-problem using BBO. It suggests a repair mechanism for handling minimum-up/down and spinning reserve constraints. The simulation results on a 10 unit test problem with a wind farm clearly indicate that the developed method is robust and computationally efficient.