Fast technique for unit commitment by genetic algorithm based on unit clustering

T. Senjyu, A.Y. Saber, T. Miyagi, K. Shimabukuro, N. Urasaki and T. Funabashi Abstract: The paper presents a new approach to the large-scale unit-commitment problem. To reduce computation time and to satisfy the minimum up/down-time constraint easily, a group of units having analogous characteristics is clustered. Then, this clustered compress problem is solved by means of a genetic algorithm. Besides, problem-oriented powerful tools such as relaxed-pruned ELD, intelligent mutation, shift operator etc. make the proposed approach more effective with respect to both cost and execution time. The proposed algorithm is tested using the reported problem data set. Simulation results for systems of up to 100-unit are compared with previous reported results. Numerical results show an improvement in the solution cost compared with the results obtained from a genetic algorithm with standard operations.

List of symbols and notations The following c-costi c-s-houri D(t) CFi t h-costi i Ii(t) N NC Pi (t) Pimax Pimin R(t) CSi t t T CT TH Tion Tioff Xion t Xioff t notations are used throughout the paper: cold start cost of ith unit cold start hour of ith unit load demand at hour t fuel cost of ith unit hot start cost of ith unit index of unit or string i 1; 2; . . . ; N ith unit status at hour t (1 if the unit is on and 0 if off at hour t) number of units number of clusters output power of ith unit at hour t maximum output limit of the ith unit minimum output limit of ith unit system spinning reserve at hour t start-up cost of ith unit index of time t 1; 2; . . . ; T scheduling period total cost threshold for cluster minimum up time of ith unit minimum down time of the ith unit duration during which ith unit is continuously ON duration during which ith unit is continuously OFF

The above unit parameter notations are also used for clusters.

Introduction

r IEE, 2005 IEE Proceedings online no. 20045299 doi:10.1049/ip-gtd:20045299 Paper rst received 24th December 2004 and in nal revised form 30th May 2005 T. Senjyu, A.Y. Saber, T. Miyagi, K. Shimabukuro and N. Urasaki are with Faculty of Engineering, University of the Ryukyus, 1 Senbaru Nishihara-cho Nakagami, Okinawa 903-0213, Japan T. Funabashi is with Meidensha Corporation, Riverside Building 36-2, Nihonbashi Hakozakacho, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 103-8515, Japan E-mail: b985542@yahoo.co.jp IEE Proc.-Gener. Transm. Distrib., Vol. 152, No. 5, September 2005

More economical operation has been required to enable the maximum prot to be generated since deregulation of the competitive electric-power market in recent years. An optimal unit-commitment (UC) solution is therefore an essential factor in planning and operation of power systems. The UC problem is to schedule correctly the on/off status of all the units in the system. In addition, to satisfy a large number of constraints, the optimal UC should provide the predicted load, calculated in advance, plus the spinningreserve requirement at every time interval, such that the total cost is a minimum. The UC problem is formulated as a combinatorial-optimisation problem with 01 variables which represent offon states and continuous variables that indicate unit outputs. The exact optimal solution can be obtained by complete enumeration only, but the number of combinations of 01 variables grows exponentially, as the search space of UC is vast. Therefore, UC is known as one of the problems which is the most difcult to solve in power systems. Many optimisation techniques have been proposed for solving UC problems. For example, there are branchand-bound (BB) [1], Lagrangian-relaxation (LR) [2], simulated-annealing (SA) [3, 4], dynamic-programming (DP) [5] etc. The BB and DP methods run the risk of a deciency of storage capacity and an enormous increase in the calculation time because it is a large-scale problem. The LR method concentrates on nding an appropriate co-ordination technique for generating feasible primal solutions, while minimising the duality gap. The main problem with the LR method is difculty encountered in obtaining feasible solutions. The SA method takes a lot of calculation time for the iteration feature. In the standard simulated-annealing algorithm, a large share of the computation time is spent in randomly generating and evaluating solutions after a single bit-ipping that turns out to be infeasible. Researchers always try to merge
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SA with other methods where SA solves one part of the UC problem. This paper presents a genetic-algorithm (GA) solution to the large-scale UC problem. The GA is a general-purpose search technique based on principles inspired from the genetic and evolution mechanism observed in natural systems and populations of living beings. Recently, GA has been applied successfully to UC problems [613]. However, GA requires excessive computation time because there are many candidate solutions. In addition, infeasible solutions may be generated since genetic operators are operated at random. To overcome these difculties, the concept of unit clustering and new genetic operators efcient for UC problem is introduced. In previous papers, authors have tried to introduce new methods to handle all the constraints except minimum up/down time. In this paper, minimum up/down times has been managed by unit clustering. For unit clustering, units having a similar unit parameter, e.g. the minimum up/down time, are clustered and considered as equivalent to a single unit with a large output range. Hence, the original problem scale is reduced to a small-scale problem, whereby computational effort can be saved. From simulation results, the economical operation schedule can be obtained in computation time which is reasonable compared to previous reported results in [13, 14]. 2 Problem formulation

minimum down time as follows:  h-costi : Tioff  Xioff t  Hioff CSi t c-costi : Xioff t4Hioff Hioff Tioff c-s-houri

The shut-down cost SD is usually a constant value for each unit. In this paper, the shut-down cost has been taken equal to 0 for all units and is excluded from the objective function.

2.2

Constraints

The UC problem has some constraints on the characteristics of generators, technical limitations etc. The overall objective is to minimise the total cost subject to the following constraints: (a) System power balance The total power generated each hour must supply the load demand D(t), N X Pi t 5 Dt
i1

2.1

Objective function

(b) Spinning reserve To maintain system reliability, adequate spinning reserves are required. In this paper, spinning reserve is 10% of the load demand [13]: N X Ii tPimax  Dt Rt 6
i1

The objective of the UC problem is minimisation of the total cost. (i) Total cost The total cost CT over the entire scheduling period is the sum of the fuel and start-up cost for all the units. Mathematically, the overall objective function of the UC problem is as follows:
T X N X t 1 i 1

(c) Unit-output limits Each unit has an output range, which is represented as Pimin  Pi t  Pimax 7

(d) Minimum up/down time Once a unit is committed/decommitted, there is a minimum time before it can be decommitted/committed. Tion  Xion t Tioff  Xioff t 8

min CT

fCFi t CSi tg

(ii) Fuel cost The fuel cost of a thermal unit is expressed as a secondorder parabolic function of each unit output as follows: CFi t ai bi Pi t ci Pi2 t 2

(e) Initial status At the beginning of the schedule, the unit initial status must be taken into account. 3 Proposed methodology

where ai, bi and ci are positive fuel-cost coefcients. (iii) Start-up cost The start-up cost for restarting a decommitted thermal unit, which is related to the temperature of the boiler, is included in this model. The generator start-up cost, CSi depends on the time the unit has been off prior to start-up. Feasible solutions have to satisfy minimum-down-time constraint (8) of all units. In this paper, the time-dependent start-up cost is simplied using transition hour Hioff from hot to cold start which is dened in (4). The start-up cost will be high cold cost (c-costi) when down-time duration Xioff is at least a cold-start hour (c-s-houri) in excess of the minimum down time (Tioff ) and will be low hot cost (h-costi) when downtime duration at least the c-s-hour less than the excess
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Our proposed UC algorithm by GA based on unit clustering consists of clustering, load-based initialisation, elite selection, crossover, mutation, shift operation, intelligent mutation, relaxedpruned economic load dispatch, decoding the schedule to an original scale problem and modication of schedule. All the GA operators are applied on clusters. A step-by-step GA method for the UC problem is outlined as follows: Proposed algorithm for UC: Step 00: Initialise the parameters such as the size of population, the crossover rate, the mutation rate, the maximum generation etc. and reset the generation counter k 0; Step 01: Cluster the units and make the problem a smaller one; Step 02: Generate initial feasible solutions based on load demand;
IEE Proc.-Gener. Transm. Distrib., Vol. 152, No. 5, September 2005

Step 03: Apply elitism and roulette wheel selection to the current population; Step 04: Perform a crossover operation on selected chromosomes and set the sign bits for the hours when the schedule is changed; Step 05: Apply a mutation operator and set the sign bits for hours when the schedule is changed; Step 06: Apply the shift operator and set the sign bits for hours when the schedule is changed; Step 07: Apply an intelligent mutation operator and set the sign bits for hours when the schedule is changed; Step 08: Solve the relaxedpruned ELD after temporarily decoding the schedule for cost calculation only; Step 09: If the stopping criterion is not satised, increase the counter K by 1 and go to step 03; Step 10: Decode the best clustered schedule; Step 11: Further modify the schedule by shutting down the excess units and grey-zone improvement; Step 12: Print out the nal solution. In the following Sections, all the ideas, important terms and operators of our proposed GA algorithm will be described.

1500 load, MW 1300 1100 900 700 0 5 10 15 20 25

unit 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

unit M 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 unit M+1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0

unit Nc 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 sign 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Fig. 2

Initial solution (minimum up time: 3 h)

3.1

Chromosome representation

ties related to minimum up time, the minimum up time for each unit is also satised when the unit status is set continuously on. In addition, all the sign bits are set 1 for initial solutions as they are new.

Usually a binary matrix of dimension N T is used to represent a chromosome of a UC problem where N is the number of units during time period T. However, we have introduced an NC 1 T binary matrix (Fig. 1) where NC stands for number of clusters and the last row vector indicates any change of the schedule. Each bit of the lastrow vector is a sign whether any change has occurred or not at a specic hour after application of the GA operators. This new vector cuts overhead recalculations of the unchanged hour schedule. This clustered (compressed) matrix will be decoded to N T in Section 3.12. In this paper, unit indicates cluster.
1 unit 1 unit 2 0 0 2 0 1 3 1 1 4 1 1 5 1 1 1 0 0 0 T 0 0

3.3

Unit clustering for large-scale problem

unit NC sign

0 1

0 1

0 1

1 0

1 1

1 1

1 0

0 1

Fig. 1

Commitment schedule

3.2

Generating initial population

It is an optimistic idea that, at peak load, all the units may be committed and there may be no excess unit in the system, which is unused throughout the entire scheduling period. It is difcult to generate feasible solutions when the initial population is generated at random, so the generation of the initial population is carried out by focusing on the load curve for the scheduling period. Usually more generators are started up during the peak load, whereas few generators are started at the minimum load. Therefore, as shown in Fig. 2, generators are mainly set to a continuous on status at the peak load to obtain feasible solutions efciently. Moreover, to obviate difculIEE Proc.-Gener. Transm. Distrib., Vol. 152, No. 5, September 2005

The large-scale UC problem has a vast search space because of the large number of combinations. A huge number of candidate solutions and iterative calculations is therefore required for GA. To solve the large UC problem in a reasonable computation time, we present the unit-clustering method here. Fixed or dynamic clustering may be applicable in this case. In this paper, we apply dynamic clustering where the number of clusters is not constant but depends on threshold TH. The denition of clustering is the process of collecting units into groups whose members are similar (not necessarily the same) in some way. A cluster is therefore a collection of units which are similar and are dissimilar to the units belonging to other clusters. To satisfy constraint (8), a minimum up/down-time characteristic is set to calculate similarity. Two units are members of the same cluster if the difference between minimum up/down times of the rst and second units is less than a predened threshold, TH. In our paper, TH equals 1 h. Each cluster must be exclusive so that, if a certain unit belongs to a denite cluster, then it must not be included in another cluster. Then members of the cluster are integrated and temporarily considered as equivalent to a single unit. Its main advantage is its scalability. Hence the original scale problem is reduced to a smaller problem for GA operators and therefore computational effort can be saved. Note that a cluster being on does not mean that all the members of that cluster are on simultaneously. Each member unit of a cluster is properly scheduled depending on load by decoding the schedule in Section 3.12 after GA operations. Data for the base 10-unit system [13] are shown in Table 1. For the 20-unit system, the base 10-unit system data are duplicated. Similarly, other unit systems are expanded in the same manner. Table 2 shows clusters and member units of each cluster for a 10-unit system. For each cluster prototype, the maximum output limit and start-up cost are the sum of all clustered member units, the minimum output limit is the lowest value among all the member units and the minimum up/down time is the highest value among the member units. max min So the valid output range Punit i Punit i of a cluster is much
707

Table 1: Unit characteristics and cost coefcients

Unit 1 Pimax (MW) Pimin (MW) ai ($) bi ($/MW) ci ($/MW2) Tion (h) Tioff (h) h-costi ($) c-costi ($) c-s-houri (h) Initial state(h) 455 150 1000 16.19 0.00048 8 8 4500 9000 5 +8 Unit 2 455 150 970 17.26 0.00031 8 8 5000 10 000 5 +8 Unit 3 130 20 700 16.60 0.002 5 5 550 1100 4 5 Unit 4 130 20 680 16.50 0.00211 5 5 560 1120 4 5 Unit 5 162 25 450 19.70 0.00398 6 6 900 1800 4 6 Unit 6 80 20 370 22.26 0.00712 3 3 170 340 2 3 Unit 7 85 25 480 27.74 0.00079 3 3 260 520 2 3 Unit 8 55 10 660 25.92 0.00413 1 1 30 60 0 1 Unit 9 55 10 665 27.27 0.00222 1 1 30 60 0 1 Unit 10 55 10 670 27.79 0.00173 1 1 30 60 0 1

Table 2: Clusters for the units of Table 1

Cluster Cluster 1: unit 1 Cluster 2: unit 2 Cluster 3: unit 3 Cluster 4: unit 4 Members of cluster Unit 1 Unit 2 Unit 3 Unit 4 Unit 5 Unit 6 Unit 7 Unit 8 Unit 9 Unit 10

more than that of an individual unit. This large output range not only discourages turning on of all the member units of a cluster at a time, but also provides facilities to combine suitable units of different clusters to achieve a lower cost. The arithmetic mean of each fuel-cost-function coefcient (e.g. ai, bi, ci) of member units is considered as the fuel cost coefcient of the derived cluster. For a 60-unit system (for example), the integrated maximum output limit of cluster 1, denoted as unit 1, is
max max max 6 P2 5460 MW Punit 1 6 P1

problems can be reduced to four-cluster problems if the threshold, TH is set to 1 h. Then, the proposed GA is applied to this four-cluster system. In a large-scale UC problem, more than one member unit of a cluster may be the same. Multiple existences of a member (copy units) in a cluster make a subcluster (SC) of that cluster. For each subcluster prototype, the maximum output limit and start-up cost are the sum of those for all subclustered member units; the minimum output limit, minimum up/down time and fuel-cost coefcients are the same as for the member units. For the 60-unit system in Table 3, cluster 1 (unit 1) consists of two subclusters where both the rst subcluster (SC1) and the second subcluster (SC2) have six members. SC1 and SC2 are generated from Unit 1 and Unit 2 of the base 10-unit system, respectively. This subcluster helps to decode the schedule with fewer combinations of members in a cluster. Clustering may lead to locally optimal solutions, so the decoding process in Section 3.12 nds the most appropriate combination of member units among on clusters. Finally, improvement methods taking different unit characteristics into account are applied in order to prevent them.

Table 3 shows clusters based on the minimum up/down time and their parameters for 60-unit system. The minimum up/down time of unit 2 has been set to 6 h so as to satisfy 5 h and 6 h minimum up/down time constraints of member units successfully. As a result, 40, 60, 80 and 100-unit

3.4

Copy operator

The best solution is copied to the next generation. This elitist model enforces preservation of the best chromosome. It leads via a forward direction to more feasible solutions in every iteration of the GA.

Table 3: Clusters, subclusters and their parameters for 60-unit system

unit 1 (SC1, SC2) Pimax (MW) Pimin ai ($) bi ($/MW) ci ($/MW2) Tion h Tioff h h-costi ($) c-costi ($) c-s-houri (h) Initial state(h) 708 (MW) 5460 150 985 16.73 0.00040 8 8 57 000 114 000 5 +8 unit 2 (SC1, SC2, SC3) 2532 20 610 17.60 0.00270 6 6 12 060 24 120 4 6 unit 3 (SC1, SC2) 990 20 425 25.00 0.00395 3 3 2580 5160 2 3 unit 4 (SC1, SC2, SC3) 990 10 665 26.99 0.00269 1 1 540 1080 0 1

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3.5

Selection operator

To apply various GA operators, the remainder of the chromosomes of the new population are selected with respect to the probability distribution based on evalution values using a roulette-wheel selection procedure.

left

1 or

3.6

Crossover operator
right 0 0 0 1 1

When a standard crossover e.g. a single- or two-point crossover, and a uniform crossover are adopted, the minimum up/down time constraint (8) may be violated. In the UC solution, the GA operator which signicantly breaks the continuity of time, is not preferred. To maintain simply the continuity of time, we use the new crossover, as shown in Fig. 3. Between two randomly selected chromosomes, this crossover exchanges feasible schedules of the same cluster over the entire scheduling period. An X-OR operation of the exchanged schedules is performed to obtain new sign bits.
unit 1 unit 2 unit NC

Fig. 5

Shift operator

when units of a cluster are started early or late. This operator adjusts the commitment schedule slightly. As the schedule is changed after shifting, the sign bits are calculated as follows: S S 0; Signi Si Si1 for left shift and S 0 S ; Signi Si Si1 for right shift where S, + and " are shifted string, string concatenation and X-OR operator, respectively.

3.9

Intelligent mutation

unit 1

unit 2

unit NC

Fig. 3

Crossover operator

The GA operators generally use the random numbers. Hence, it is difcult to ensure cost reduction. To achieve a lower cost, an intelligent mutation is introduced. First, this operator looks for a changing period which changes from off to on status, as shown in Fig. 6. Then at this period, (6) is calculated, excess clusters/units are shut down and in turn decient clusters/units are started up until (6) is satised. The intelligent mutation is introduced here for two important reasons. First, it is one of the GA operators concerned with UC clusters and secondly, it is applied to the best solution before applying the improvement method mentioned in Section 3.13. It assists more than a repair algorithm.

3.7

Mutation operator

Since standard mutation selects the mutation point randomly, it is difcult to satisfy a minimum-up/downtime constraint. To handle a minimum-up/down-time constraint successfully as for the crossover operator, a new mutation operator is adopted. As shown in Fig. 4, this operator looks for 01 or 10 combinations in the commitment schedule; then the mutation operator changes the combinations randomly to 00 or 11 [8]. This operator helps to protect from excess or decit of power, to make a hot start from a cold start etc.
0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 or 0 1 1

3.10

Evaluation

For every violated constraint, a penalty term consisting of the amount of violation of constraint multiplied by a constant, is added to the total cost, CT of (1). 10 F CT a PENA where PENA is the amount of violation of constraint and a is the penalty multiplier (very large). This function discourages an infeasible solution for the next generation.

3.11

Relaxedpruned ELD calculation

The economic load dispatch (ELD) is a computationally intensive part of the unit commitment problem. To save computational effort, ELD is therefore performed very carefully and intelligently using the following criteria: Criterion 1: ELD is performed if the schedule is able to satisfy the spinning reserve and minimum-up/down time constraints. A large penalty value is added otherwise. Criterion 2: ELD is performed only for the hours when the introduced sign bits are 1s, i.e. the schedule has been changed owing to GA operations. ELD calculations for the rest of the hours are pruned. As the entire period-based crossover operator, the new mutation operator, the shift operator etc. are used, this pruned ELD saves a considerable amount of calculations. Criterion 3: In an iteration method such as GA, the quality of solution is poor at the beginning of the iteration but it gradually improves at successive evolutions. In the proposed
709

1 1 1 0 0 1

0 or

Fig. 4

Mutation operator

3.8

Shift operator

As shown in Fig. 5, the entire schedule of the selected cluster is shifted 1 h to the left or right. This operator is effective
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shut down

D (t ) + R (t )

D (t ) + R (t )

P4 max electric power, MW electric power, MW

P4 max

P3 max

P3 max

P2 max

P2 max

P1 max

P1 max

unit 1

unit 1

unit 2

unit 2

unit 3

unit 3

unit 4

unit 4

shut down

Fig. 6

Intelligent mutation

method, relaxed ELD is therefore performed at the beginning and exact ELD is performed near the nal generation. The relaxed ELD is a small calculation since its accuracy range is low, while the exact ELD is a large calculation. The accuracy range of ELD is measured in megawatts which is the total output of the generating units minus load. Figure 7 shows the accuracy range of ELD with respect to generation. From simulation, it can be seen that power outputs exceed the valid output limits of individual units and thus need iterations. Unit clustering takes care of this problem.
80 70 deviation range of ELD, MW 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 0 100 200 300 400 500 generations

As clustered units have a large output range, in most cases a single iteration is enough to produce outputs within the valid range. All sign bits are reset (0) after successful ELD calculations before the next iteration starts.

3.12

Decoding the schedule

Proper decoding is an important part of a clustered UC schedule. Table 4 shows a schedule for a four-cluster system, which solves the 40-unit system by our proposed method, for example. This schedule is converted to the original scale one, i.e. the 40-unit system. The following steps are performed to obtain the original schedule: Step 1: Calculate the load Lc of each on cluster at the schedule using economic load dispatch (ELD) where the load demand is the actual demand of each hour and fuelcost coefcients are calculated from Section 3.3. Step 2: For each derived load Lc nd the optimal schedule and load Lsc of all subclusters in the cluster from all possible binary combinations of subclusters using economic load dispatch.

Table 4: Cluster-commitment schedule for 40-unit system

Cluster unit 1 unit 2 unit 3 unit 4 Period (1B24) 111111111111111111111111 001111111111111111111110 000000001111111000011100 000000000111100000010000
IEE Proc.-Gener. Transm. Distrib., Vol. 152, No. 5, September 2005

Fig. 7
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Deviation range of ELD

Step 3: For N similar units in a subcluster, economic load dispatch will be D/N for each unit where D is load demand (see Appendix, Section 8). The derived load Lsc is therefore equally distributed to the minimum member of units provided that output power does not exceed the maximum limit of individual unit. A real schedule is produced by merging the schedules of all units. Step 2 is not time-consuming, as there are a few subclusters in a cluster. The Appendix (Section 8) will justify the statements of the above step 3 of the decoding schedule. This also helps to shutdown excess units.

Table 5: Transformed commitment schedule (Total cost $2 247 336)

Unit Unit 1 Unit 2 Unit 3 Unit 4 Unit 5 Unit 6 Unit 7 Unit 8 Unit 9 Unit 10 Unit 11 Unit 12 Unit 13 Unit 14 Unit 15 Unit 16 Unit 17 Unit 18 Unit 19 Unit 20 Unit 21 Unit 22 Unit 23 Unit 24 Unit 25 Unit 26 Unit 27 Unit 28 Unit 29 Unit 30 Unit 31 Unit 32 Unit 33 Unit 34 Unit 35 Unit 36 Unit 37 Unit 38 Unit 39 Unit 40 Period(1B24) 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 000000011111111111110000 000000011111111111110000 000000111111111111111000 000001111111111111111000 000001111111111111111000 000001111111111111111000 000001111111111111111000 000011111111111111111000 000111111111111111111100 000111111111111111111100 000111111111111111111110 001111111111111111111110 000000001111110000011100 000000001111110000011100 000000001111110000011100 000000001111110000011100 000000001111110000011100 000000000111100000011100 000000000111100000011100 000000000111100000011100 000000000111100000010000 000000000111100000010000 000000000111100000010000 000000000111100000010000 000000000011000000000000 000000000011000000000000 000000000011000000000000 000000000011000000000000 000000000001000000000000 000000000001000000000000 000000000001000000000000 000000000001000000000000

3.13

Modication of schedule

The converted schedule may have some excess units. At rst, these units are shutdown by applying the intelligent mutation, mentioned in Section 3.9. Table 5 shows a schedule after application of the intelligent mutation. Then, to reduce the cost further, the proposed grey-zone modication methods, as shown in Figs. 8 and 9, are applied. The grey zone for start-up cost indicates (T off +c-s-hour)th off hour when a unit enters into cold start-up from hot start-up. As cold start-up cost is higher than hot start-up cost, it is desirable that the unit starts up with the hot start-up cost if possible. The method in Fig. 8 searches the grey zone for start-up cost and modies the schedule accordingly. The method in Fig. 9 searches other grey zones for interchange which relates directly to units and modies the schedule by exchanging unit states for the improvement of cost, provided that constraints are not violated.

3.14

Stopping criterion

The GA loop is terminated when there is no signicant improvement in the solution or the maximum number of generations is reached. 4 Simulation data

The unit data are shown in Table 1 and the load demand can be found in [13]. To perform a simulation under the same conditions as [11, 12], the spinning-reserve requirement is assumed to be 10% of the load demand and total scheduling period is 24 h. The simulations include runs for 40-, 60-, 80- and 100-unit systems and scheduling periods are 24 h. In Table 1, initial state represents the initial unit status at the start of the scheduling period, and the positive sign indicates that unit is on, whereas the negative sign indicates off. For example, the initial status of 5 for Unit 3 in Table 1 indicates that Unit 3 had been shutdown for the previous 5 h. Adaptation of genetic-operator probabilities, which are decided by trial and error, are shown in Table 6. The population size is 20, the penalty multiplier is 9 000 000 and the total generation is 500 in all runs. All calculations have been run on a 1.5 GHz Pentium-4 CPU with 128 MB RAM using Linux version 2.2.18 and gcc version 2.91.66. 5 Simulation results

The simulation results are shown in Tables 7 and 8. 20 trials are made for each unit system, starting with different initial populations for each run owing to the stochastic nature of GA. Total costs are shown for the best, worst and average cases. It always converges and operating-cost variation is negligible. Solutions are not biased and they are equally distributed between the best and worst solutions. These
IEE Proc.-Gener. Transm. Distrib., Vol. 152, No. 5, September 2005

facts strongly demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method. As shown in Table 7, the proposed method gives a better solution than other methods [13, 14]. Table 8 shows a comparison of the execution time, which is the average value of 20 trials. As can be seen from Table 8, the execution time is faster than others because search spaces are reduced by adopting relaxedpruned ELD and the unitclustering method. Table 9 shows a nal schedule for a 40unit system after application of the intelligent mutation and grey-zone-modication method. This is the best result (total cost $2 246 561) for the 40-unit system in Table 7. In Table 9, underscores indicate that states are different from
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grey zone

Table 8: Comparison of execution time

Execution time (s)

40 units Proposed method 1.35 2697 1176

60 units 1.37 5840 2267

80 units 1.72 10 036 3584

100 units 1.58 15 733 6120

Reference [13] Reference [14]

Table 9: Final $2 246 561)

0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1

commitment
Period (1B24)

schedule

(Total

cost

Unit
0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1

Unit 1 Unit 2 Unit 3

111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 111111111111111111111111 000000011111111111110000 000000011111111111110000 000000111111111111111000 000001111111111111111000 000001111111111111111000 0 00 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 000011111111111111111100 000011111111111111111100 000111111111111111111000 000111111111111111111000 000111111111111111111110 001111111111111111111110 000000001111110000011100 000000001111110000011100 000000001111110000011100 000000001111110000011100 000000001111110000011100 000000000111100000011100 000000000111100000011100 000000000111100000011100 000000000111100000010000 000000000111100000010000 000000000111100000010000 000000000111100000010000 000000000011000000000000 000000000011000000000000 000000000011000000000000 000000000011000000000000 000000000001000000000000 000000000001000000000000 000000000001000000000000 000000000001000000000000

hot-start cost cold-start cost

Unit 4 Unit 5 Unit 6 Unit 7 Unit 8 Unit 9 Unit 10 Unit 11 Unit 12 Unit 13 Unit 14 Unit 15 Unit 16

Fig. 8

Grey zone for start-up cost

1 1 1

1 1 1

1 1 1

1 1 1

1 0 1

1 0 0

0 0 0

0 0 0 grey zone

1 1 1

1 1 1

1 1 1

1 1 1

0 1 1

0 0 1

0 0 0

0 0 0

Unit 17 Unit 18 Unit 19 Unit 20 Unit 21 Unit 22 Unit 23 Unit 24 Unit 25 0.8 0.1 0.2 1.0 Unit 26 Unit 27 Unit 28 Unit 29 Unit 30 Unit 31

Fig. 9

Grey zone for interchange

Table 6: Best parameter settings of GA operators

Crossover probability Mutation probability Shift probability Intelligent mutation probability

Table 7: Comparison of total cost

Total cost ($) 40 units Best Worst Average Reference [13] Reference [14] 2 246 561 2 247 214 2 246 969 2 251 911 2 249 093 60 units 3 366 210 3 367 154 3 366 412 3 376 625 3 371 611 80 units 4 489 507 4 490 528 4 489 944 4 504 933 4 498 479 100 units 5 608 685 5 610 739 5 609 780 5 627 437 5 623 885

Unit 32 Unit 33 Unit 34 Unit 35 Unit 36 Unit 37 Unit 38 Unit 39 Unit 40

those in Table 5. An on status of Unit 15 at the 5th hour is modied by the grey zone for start-up cost, i.e. the start-up cost of unit 15 changes from cold-start-up cost to hot-startup cost, and is different from the value in Table 5. Those
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units that have similar heat-rate curves, e.g. units 1518, have the possibility of cost reduction by exchanging their states subject to various constraints. Four states of units 15, 16, 17 and 18 at the 22nd hour in Table 9 are modied
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owing to the existence of other grey zones for interchange. Comparing Table 5 and Table 9, the total cost in Table 9 is lower by just $775 than that in Table 5. Among the reduced costs, $344 is the grey-zone modication for start-up cost and $431 is other grey-zone modications for interchanges. 6 Conclusions

This paper presents a fast cluster-based GA technique for the large-thermal-unit-commitment problems. Our contribution is by introducing clusters and effective relaxed pruned ELD calculations with GA operators to remove the drawbacks of GA. To reduce the vast search space, a unit clustering technique is proposed. Furthermore, to improve the computational effort, a relaxedpruned ELD is applied. On the other hand, to produce a cost-effective schedule, the intelligent mutation and grey-zone-modication methods are incorporated. The proposed method is more effective when the unit data have similar characteristics. Simulation results demonstrate the real power of this approach for the UC problem. It is a promising approach. Future work will attempt to develop both clusters and prototype calculations intelligently, depending on suitable attributes of units for ELD and GA. 7 References

7 Cheng, C.-P., Liu, C.-W., and Liu, C.-C.: Unit commitment by Lagrangian relaxation and genetic algorithm, IEEE Trans., 2000, PWRS-15, (2), pp. 707714 8 Maifed, T.T., and Sheble, G.B.: Genetic-based unit commitment problem, IEEE Trans., 1996, PWRS-11, (3), pp. 13591365 9 Orero, S.O., and Irving, M.R.: Large scale unit commitment using a hybrid genetic algorithm, Electr. Power Energy Syst., 1997, 19, (1), pp. 4555 10 Valenzuela, J., and Amith, A.E.: A seeded memetic algorithm for large unit commitment problems, J. Heuristics, 2002, 8, pp. 173195 11 Senjyu, T., Yamashiro, H., Shimabukuro, K., Uezato, K., and Funabashi, T.: Fast solution technique for large-scale unit commitment problem using genetic algorithm, IEE Proc.-Gener. Transm. Distrib., 2003, 150, (6), pp. 753760 12 Damousis, I.G., Bakirtzis, A.G., and Dokopoulos, P.S.: A solution to the unit-commitment problem using integer-coded genetic algorithm, IEEE Trans., 2004, PWRS-19, (2), pp. 11651172 13 Kazarlis, S.A., Bakirtzis, A.G., and Petridis, V.: A genetic algorithm solution to the unit commitment problem, IEEE Trans., 1996, PWRS-11, (1), pp. 8392 14 Juste, K.A., Kita, H., Tanaka, E., and Hasegawa, J.: An evolutionary programming to the unit commitment problem, IEEE Trans., 1999, PWRS-14, (4), pp. 14521459

8 Appendix l and P calculations of N units for economic load dispatch are PN 1 bi =c i 2D l i P N i 1 1=c i PN 1 bi 1 bi i1 bi =ci 2D Pi l PN 2c i 2ci 2ci 2 ci 1 = c i i1 As member units are the same at a subcluster, then a1 aN a; b1 bN b; c1 cN c and output power Pi 1 Nb b D c 2D equal 2c N 1 2 c N c

1 Lauer, G.S., Bertsekas, D.P., Sandell, N.R. Jr., and Posbergh, T.A.: Solution of large-scale optimal unit commitment problems, IEEE Trans., 1982, PAS-101, pp. 7986 2 Svoboda, A.J., Tseng, C.-L., Li, C., and Johnson, R.B.: Short-term resource scheduling with ramp constraints, IEEE Trans., 1997, PWRS-12, (1), pp. 7783 3 Mantawy, A.H., Abdel-Magid, Y.L., and Selim, S.Z.: A simulated annealing algorithm for unit commitment, IEEE Trans., 1998, PWRS-13, (1), pp. 197204 4 Purushothama, G.K., and Jenkins, L.: Simulated annealing with local search-a hybrid algorithm for unit commitment, IEEE Trans., 2003, PWRS-18, (1), pp. 273278 5 Li, C., Johnson, R.B., and Svoboda, A.J.: A new unit commitment method, IEEE Trans., 1997, PWRS-12, (1), pp. 113118 6 Richter, C.W., and Sheble, G.B.: A prot-based unit commitment GA for the competitive environment, IEEE Trans., 2000, PWRS-15, (2), pp. 715721

Now, the minimum number of member units that will be on at a subcluster is Nmin LSC =P max where P max is the maximum output power of a member unit and the output power for each Nmin member unit is P D=Nmin where Nmin oN and N Nmin is the excess number of units.

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