Particle swarm optimisation for operational planning: Unit commitment and economic dispatch

Abstract

This chapter proposes the application of a Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) algorithm to Unit Commitment (UC) and Economic Dispatch (ED) problems, which occur in the operational planning of a power system. To solve the UC problem, PSO is applied to update the Lagrange multipliers and is also incorporated into the Lagrange Relaxation method to improve its performance. For the ED problem, PSO is integrated into a modified heuristic search to enhance the searching efficiency. The research shows that the proposed methods can provide solutions with good quality and stable convergence characteristics whilst their implementation is simple and their computation time is reasonable. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.