Unit commitment based on modified firefly algorithm

Optimization technologies have drawn considerable interest in power system research. The success of an optimization process depends on the efficient selection of method and its parameters based on the problem to be solved. Firefly algorithm is a suitable method for power system operation scheduling. This paper presents a modified firefly algorithm to address unit commitment issues. Generally, two steps are involved in solving unit commitment problems. The first step determines the generating units to be operated, and the second step calculates the amount of demand-sharing among the units (obtained from the first step) to minimize the cost that corresponds to the load demand and constraints. In this work, the priority list method was used in the first step and the second step adopted the modified firefly algorithm. Ten generators were selected to test the proposed method, while the values of the cost function were regarded as criteria to gauge and compare the modified firefly algorithm with the classical firefly algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithms. Results show that the proposed approach is more efficient than the other methods in terms of generator and error selections between load and generation.