A New Hybrid Binary-Real Coded Cuckoo Search and Tabu Search Algorithm for Solving the Unit-Commitment Problem

1. Introduction

Power systems are a grid of electric components working together in order to generate, transport and distribute electric energy in order to supply the consumers of a specific area. The power generation industry plays a crucial role in power systems reliability by trading off between satisfying the energy load demand and maximizing the profit. The Unit Commitment (UC) problem is one of the biggest challenges of the power industry. The problem consists in the minimization of the power generation cost to meet the forecasted demand by finding the right strategy of the On/Off status of the generating units during each interval of the scheduling period. This is accomplished under a large set of operating constraints, such as the generator power output limits, system spinning reserve, ramp rate limits, and minimum up and down times of the units (Kaveh et al., 2009; Park et al., 2014).

The UC problem can be seen as two correlated sub problems; the first one which belongs to the class of mixed-integer nonlinear programming problems. It aims in determining the best On/Off state strategy of the generating units in the planning horizon. The second one, which belongs to the class of the quadratic programming optimization problems, consists in finding the optimal dispatching to meet the forecasted load demand among the committed units during the scheduling period (Gharehpetian, 2010; Simopoulos et al., 2006).