Simulated annealing for the unit commitment problem

Due to their efficiency and their interesting design and implementation features, metaheuristics have been used for a long time with success, in dealing with combinatorial problems. They have been applied to the unit commitment problem with rather interesting results that justify further research in the area. In this paper we present a simulated annealing approach to the unit commitment problem. Two coding schemes are compared, new neighbourhood structures are presented and some searching strategies are discussed. Preliminary computational experience, performed on some test instances, shows that this approach is flexible, effective and able to handle variations on the problem structure.