Unit commitment by simulated annealing

A general optimization method, known as simulated annealing, is applied to generation unit commitment. By exploiting the resemblance between a minimization process and the cooling of a molten metal, simulated annealing generates feasible solutions randomly and moves among these solutions using a strategy leading to a global minimum with high probabilities. The method assumes no specific problem structures and is highly flexible in handling unit commitment constraints. A concise introduction to the method is given. Numerical results on test systems of up to 100 units are reported