Reliability constrained unit commitment with electric vehicle to grid using Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization and Ant Colony Optimization

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology as a new generation of Energy Storage Units (ESUs) is receiving an increasing research attention. Because of the capability of reducing dependencies on small expensive units and optimizing the fluctuation of load curve, they can play an important role in power system. This paper proposes a novel approach for considering Gridable Vehicles (GVs) of V2G in a short-term unit commitment problem. Inclusion of V2G in the problem could result some reliability challenges. Some contributed reliability indices are taken into account in order to maintain the reliability in an acceptable level. The unit commitment problem is solved by a Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization and Ant Colony Optimization. The results show that the total operation cost of the system increases as the allowed reliability limits decrease. The efficiency of the proposed method in near-optimal unit commitment solution can also be concluded.