Unit commitment with nature and biologically inspired computing

Several strategies have been proposed to provide quality solutions to the unit commitment problem and increase the potential saving in the power system operation. These include deterministic and stochastic search algorithms. One of the limitations of deterministic approaches is, they suffer from the curse of dimensionality when dealing with the modern power system with large number of generators. Recently evolutionary based search techniques are popularly applied to unit commitment problem which may handle complex non-linear constraints and provide high quality solution. In this paper an attempt has been made to give a detailed survey of the application of the nature and biologically inspired computing techniques in the field of unit commitment problem since past 20 years. This literature survey will be very useful to the new researchers working on this area of research.