Application of AHP/ANP to unit commitment in the deregulated power industry

This paper proposes an application of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and analytic network process (ANP) for enhancing the selection of generating power units for appropriate price allocation in a competitive power environment. The scheme addresses adequate ranking, prioritizing and scheduling of units before optimizing the pricing of generation units to meet a given demand. In the deregulated environment the classical optimization techniques will be insufficient for the above-mentioned purpose. Hence by incorporating the interaction of factors such as load demand, generating cost curve, bid/sale price, unit up/down cost, and the relative importance of different generation units, the scheme can be implemented to address the technical and nontechnical constraints in unit commitment problems. This information is easily augmented with the optimization scheme for an effective optimal decision. The scheme proposed is tested using the IEEE 39-bus test system.