Solution of the profit-based unit commitment problem by using multi-agent system

To solve the profit-based unit commitment (PBUC) problem occurred in deregulated power systems, we developed a new method by use of the multi-agent system (MAS). The agents of our PBUC-MAS utilized the rule based and dynamic programming methods to solve the new optimization problem corporately, and they could be located on different computers in the same computer network anywhere. Through the presented approach, PBUC-MAS can help generation companies (GenCos) to make decision on scheduling generators, selling power and reserving to the market to obtain their maximum profit. The results from simulation for this new method demonstrated that the proposed methodology have shown good performance.