Evolving ant colony optimization based unit commitment

Ant colony optimization (ACO) was inspired by the observation of natural behavior of real ants’ pheromone trail formation and foraging. Ant colony optimization ismore suitable for combinatorial optimization problems. ACO is successfully applied to the traveling salesman problem. Multistage decision making of ACO gives an edge over other conventional methods. This paper proposes evolving ant colony optimization (EACO) method for solving unit commitment (UC) problem. The EACO employs genetic algorithm (GA) for finding optimal set of ACO parameters, while ACO solves the UC problem. Problem formulation takes into consideration the minimum up and down time constraints, startup cost, spinning reserve, and generation limit constraints. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated on two different systems. The test results are encouraging and compared with those obtained by other methods. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.