Fuzzy unit commitment solution—A novel twofold simulated annealing approach

The authors propose a twofold simulated annealing (twofold-SA) method for the optimization of fuzzy unit commitment formulation in this paper. In the proposed method, simulated annealing (SA) and fuzzy logic are combined to obtain SA acceptance probabilities from fuzzy membership degrees. Fuzzy load is calculated from error statistics and an initial solution is generated by a priority list method. The initial solution is decomposed into hourly-schedules and each hourly-schedule is modified by decomposed-SA using a bit flipping operator. Fuzzy membership degrees are the selection attributes of the decomposed-SA. A new solution consists of these hourly-schedules of entire scheduling period after repair, as unit-wise constraints may not be fulfilled at the time of an individual hourly-schedule modification. This helps to detect and modify promising schedules of appropriate hours. In coupling-SA, this new solution is accepted for the next iteration if its cost is less than that of current solution. However, a higher cost new solution is accepted with the temperature dependent total cost membership function. Computation time of the proposed method is also improved by the imprecise tolerance of the fuzzy model. Besides, excess units with the system dependent probability distribution help to handle constraints efficiently and imprecise economic load dispatch (ELD) calculations are modified to save the execution time. The proposed method is tested using standard reported data sets. Numerical results show an improvement in solution cost and time compared to the results obtained from other existing methods.