Unit commitment using hybrid models: a comparative study for dynamic programming, expert system, fuzzy system and genetic algorithms

Hybrid models for solving unit commitment problem have been proposed in this paper. To incorporate the changes due to the addition of new constraints automatically, an expert system (ES) has been proposed. The ES combines both schedules of units to be committed based on any classical or traditional algorithms and the knowledge of experienced power system operators. A solution database, i.e. information contained in the previous schedule is used to facilitate the current solution process. The proposed ES receives the input, i.e. the unit commitment solutions from a fuzzy-neural network. The unit commitment solutions from the artificial neural network cannot offer good performance if the load patterns are dissimilar to those of the trained data. Hence, the load demands, i.e. the input to the fuzzy-neural network is considered as fuzzy variables. To take into account the uncertainty in load demands, a fuzzy decision making approach has also been developed to solve the unit commitment problem and to train the artificial neural network. Due to the mathematical complexity of traditional techniques for solving unit commitment problem and also to facilitate comparison genetic algorithm, a non-traditional optimization technique has also been proposed. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the models proposed, extensive studies have been performed for different power systems consisting of 10, 26 and 34 generating units. The generation cost obtained and the computational time required by the proposed model has been compared with the existing traditional techniques such as dynamic programming (DP), ES, fuzzy system (FS) and genetic algorithms (GA).