Nodal ant colony optimization for solving profit based unit commitment problem for GENCOs

This paper proposes a nodal ant colony optimization (NACO) technique to solve profit based unit commitment problem (PBUCP). Generation companies (GENCOs) in a competitive restructured power market, schedule their generators with an objective to maximize their own profit without any regard for system social benefit. Power and reserve prices become important factors in decision process. Ant colony optimization that mimics the behavior of ants foraging activities is suitably implemented to search the UCP search space. Here a search space consisting of optimal combination of binary nodes for unit ON/OFF status is represented for the movement of the ants to maintain good exploration and exploitation search capabilities. The proposed model help GENCOs to make decisions on the quantity of power and reserve that must be put up for sale in the markets and also to schedule generators in order to receive the maximum profit. The effectiveness of the proposed technique for PBUCP is validated on 10 and 36 generating unit systems available in the literature. NACO yields an increase of profit, greater than 1.5%, in comparison with the basic ACO, Muller method and hybrid LR-GA.

Graphical representation of Ant search space for NACO (N = 10, n = 2 and TS = 120).Figure optionsDownload as PowerPoint slideHighlights
► A novel NACO is used to maximize the profit of Generating Companies (GENCOs).
► Activities of GENCOs in the deregulated market are discussed.
► Commitment of generating units is carried out based on the demand constraints.
► Testing and validation is carried out for generating units ranging from 10 to 1000.
► A profit greater than 1.5% is achieved when compared to other existing methods.