Cost Effective Operating Strategy for Unit Commitment and Economic Dispatch of Thermal Power Plants with Cubic Cost Functions Using TLBO Algorithm

摘要

This paper deals with a Unit Commitment (UC) problem of a power plant aimed to find the optimal scheduling of the generating units involving cubic cost functions. The problem has non convex generator characteristics, which makes it very hard to handle the corresponding mathematical models. However, Teaching Learning Based Optimization (TLBO) has reached a high efficiency, in terms of solution accuracy and computing time for such non convex problems. Hence, TLBO is applied for scheduling of generators with higher order cost characteristics, and turns out to be computationally solvable. In particular, we represent a model that takes into account the accurate higher order generator cost functions along with ramp limits, and turns to be more general and efficient than those available in the literature. The behavior of the model is analyzed through proposed technique on modified IEEE-24 bus system.