Adaptive-edge search for power plant start-up scheduling

Power plant start-up scheduling is aimed at minimizing the start-up time while limiting maximum turbine-rotor stresses. A shorter start-up time not only reduces fuel and electricity consumption during the start-up process, but also increases its capability of adapting to changes in electricity demand. The start-up scheduling problem can be formulated as a function optimization problem with constraints. We have constructed an efficient and robust search model-a genetic algorithm (GA) with an enforcement operation-which forces the search along the edge of the feasible space, where the optimal schedule is supposed to exist. However, this model has to perform a prior Monte Carlo test to obtain the enforcement gains used for the implementation of the enforcement operation. In this paper, we attempt to eliminate the Monte Carlo test by proposing a self-reliant search model by introducing a GA with an adaptive enforcement operation that can generate and adapt enforcement gains during the search process. The test results of this proposed model show that the overall number of time-consuming dynamic simulations for the constraints calculation can be reduced further, thus increasing the overall efficiency of finding the optimal or near-optimal schedules