A multi-objective unit commitment problem combining economic and environmental criteria in a metaheuristic approach

The environmental concerns are having a significant impact on the operation of power systems. The traditional Unit Commitment problem (UCP), which minimizes the total production costs is inadequate when environmental emissions need to be considered in the operation of power plants. This paper proposes a metaheuristic approach combined with a non-dominated sorting procedure to find solutions for the multi-objective UCP. The metaheuristic proposed, a Biased Random Key Genetic Algorithm, is a variant of the random-key genetic algorithm, since bias is introduced in the parent selection procedure, as well as in the crossover strategy.