Rule based economic dispatch for planning of thermal units operation

A rule based economic dispatch (ED) has been proposed for the daily and weekly operation planning of thermal units. The proposed ED scheme is based on the well known equal incremental cost method to determine the load dispatch among thermal units in the study system considering several constraints. A simple rule base has also been proposed for the unit commitment according to a ranking considering the startup cost of each thermal unit. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed ED scheme, a weekly planning of 23 thermal units has been performed with highly good reduction of the total fuel cost compared with that in the actual operation.