A Hybrid Artificial Bee Colony Approach for Security Constrained Unit Commitment

In the deregulated electricity market secure operation is an enduring concern of the independent system operator (ISO). For a secure and economical hourly generation schedule of the day ahead market, ISO executes the security constrained unit commitment (SCUC) problem. The objective of the paper is to develop scheduling algorithm using hybrid artificial bee colony algorithm for electric generation that account directly for system security requirements. Utilities can obtain significantly better results if they use optimal scheduling algorithms, which comply directly with security requirements. The proposed SCUC formulation includes constraints such as hourly power demand, system reserves, ramp up/down limits and minimum ON/OFF duration limits. The innovation of our approach is to capture the system security requirements within a network flow sub-problem that is solved in conjunction with the unit commitment problem. To solve such SCUC model a binary coded artificial bee colony (BABC) is used for unit commitment master problem and real coded artificial bee colony algorithm (RABC) is used for the security constrained economic dispatch sub-problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method to solve the SCUC problem is shown on different test systems. Copyright (C) 2012 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved.