Abstract:
Owing to the development of renewable energy resources, paves the way for overcoming the difficulties of electric power generation. On combining renewable energies together brings more advantages than conventional methods. For this many more models have been proposed for scheduling the generating units according to the need of energy demand. In order to supply balanced power to the utility and the proper management of power system operation, allocation of units is the foremost concern. Usually, economic dispatch and unit commitment are the problems which may arise due to scheduling of operating units. Unit commitment is a mixed integer programming problem, linear or nonlinear and NP- hard problem involving all the operational constraints. This paper recommends a new approach for resolving unit commitment problem based on firefly algorithm. This proposed meta-heuristic optimization has a preference over earlier methods to determine the best possible solutions. The ultimate aim is to trim down the operational tariff and computational time of existing system. The proposed technique has been investigated on various case studies taking account of 38 and 100 thermal units, 2 wind and 2 hydro units respectively. The results attained from these studies satisfies all the basic constraints and on/off status of distinct generators over a time period of 24 hours. The acquired outcome is to be compared with other conventional approaches. It is apparent that the numerical results elucidate that proposed algorithm is more eminent and efficient tool for settling large scale unit commitment problems within a promising execution time.
