A solution to unit commitment problem using invasive weed optimization algorithm

Unit commitment (UC) is one of the most important aspect of power generation in the world today. Though, there is no method to find the exact optimized solution, there exists several meta-heuristic algorithms to determine the close to exact solution. This paper proposes a novel solution to effectively determine UC and generation cost using the technique of invasive weed optimization (IWO). The existing technique distributes the load demand among all the generating units. The method proposed here utilizes the output of UC obtained by using the Lagrangian relaxation (LR) method and calculates the required generation from only the plants that are ON discarding the OFF generator units and thereby giving a faster and more accurate response. Moreover, the results show the comparison between the LR-particle swarm optimization (PSO) and LR-IWO, and prove that the cost of generation for a 4 unit, 8 hour schedule is much less in the case of IWO when compared to PSO.