Extremal optimization for unit commitment problem for power systems

This paper introduces extremal optimization (EO) method to solve unit commitment problem for power systems. EO is a local-search heuristic algorithm and originally developed from the fundamentals of statistical physics. In the implementation of EO for unit commitment (UC) problem, a novel problem-specific mutation operator is introduced and rule-based heuristic constraint-repairing techniques are devised. Simulation results on power systems which are composed of up to 100-units over a scheduling horizon of 24-hours demonstrate competitive performance with EO method compared with other existing methods for UC problem.