Particle Swarm Optimization for unit commitment problem

Unit commitment problem is an important optimizing task in daily operational planning of power systems which can be mathematically formulated as a large scale nonlinear mixed-integer minimization problem for which there is no exact solution technique. The solution to the problem can be obtained only by complete enumeration, often at a prohibitively computation time requirement for realistic power systems. In this paper, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based heuristic optimization algorithms have been used to solve the problem. Three versions of PSO algorithms namely, Binary PSO, Improved binary PSO and PSO with Lagrangian relaxation were demonstrated for unit commitment problem. In generally, the benchmark data sets and method have shown that the proposed PSO algorithms are indeed capable of obtaining higher quality solutions efficiently in solving unit commitment problems.