A Genetic Algorithm Approach to Price-Based Unit Commitment

Deregulation creates competition amongst generator companies. The generator company objectives are to maximize their profit and to place proper bids in the market. In order to do this they need to determine the schedule and operating points based on the load and price forecasts. The traditional unit commitment problem aims at minimizing the cost of operation subject to fulfillment of demand. However in a deregulated environment the traditional unit commitment objective needs to be changed to maximization of profit with relaxation of the demand fulfillment constraint. This paper applies a genetic algorithm technique to price based unit commitment (PBUC) for GENCO with 3 generators and compares the solution with that obtained by dynamic programming. Proposed algorithm can be extended to 'n' number of generators.