A Unit Commitment Model with Implicit Reserve Constraint Based on an Improved Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm

An implicit reserve constraint unit commitment (IRCUC) model is presented in this paper. Different from the traditional unit commitment (UC) model, the constraint of spinning reserve is not given explicitly but implicitly in a trade-off between the production cost and the outage loss. An analytical method is applied to evaluate the reliability of UC solutions and to estimate the outage loss. The stochastic failures of generating units and uncertainties of load demands are considered while assessing the reliability. The artificial fish swarm algorithm(AFSA) is employed to solve this proposed model. In addition to the regular operation, a mutation operator (MO) is designed to enhance the searching performance of the algorithm. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated from 10 to 100 units system, and the testing results are compared with those obtained by genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and ant colony optimization (ACO) in terms of total production cost and computational time. The simulation results show that the proposed method is capable of obtaining higher quality solutions.