Unit commitment by parallel simulated annealing

The paper investigates the application of parallel simulated annealing for unit commitment problems. Two parallel simulated annealing concepts, speculative computation and serial subset, are applied to a unit commitment problem of ten thermal generators. The authors also propose a combined scheme where speculative computation is used in the initial phase and the serial subset is used in the final phase. The parallel simulated annealing schemes are tested with an example problem and the results show that the parallel schemes can considerably speed up the computation of simulated annealing