Short-term thermal generation scheduling using improved immune algorithm

This paper proposes a new immune algorithm (NIA), which merges the fuzzy system (FS), the annealing immune (AI) method and the immune algorithm (IA) together, to resolve short-term thermal generation unit commitment (UC) problems. This proposed method differs from its counterparts in three main aspects, namely: (1) changing the crossover and mutation ratios from a fixed value to a variable value determined by the fuzzy system method, (2) using the memory cell and (3) adding the annealing immune operator. With these modifications, we can attain three major advantages with the NIA, i.e. (1) the NIA will not fall into a local optimal solution trap; (2) the NIA can quickly and correctly find a full set of global optimal solutions and (3) the NIA can achieve the most economic solution for unit commitment with ease. The UC determines the start-up and shut-down schedules for related generation units to meet the forecasted demand at a minimum cost while satisfying other constraints, such as each unit's generating limit. The NIA is applied to six cases with various numbers of thermal generation units over a 24-h period. The schedule generated by the NIA is compared with that by several other methods, including the dynamic programming (DP), the Lagrangian relaxation (LR), the standard genetic algorithm (GA), the traditional simulated annealing (SA) and the traditional Tabu search (TS). The comparisons verify the validity and superiority in accuracy for the proposed method. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.