An enhanced simulated annealing approach to unit commitment

Owing to the inability of simulated annealing (SA) to generate solutions that always satisfy all the constraints, the performance of a pure SA-approach established by previous researchers in solving the unit commitment(UC) problem is not so promising. The SA technique is, however, easy to implement requires little expert knowledge and is not memory intensive. Hence, this article attempts to develop an enhanced SA-approach for solving the UC problem by adopting mechanisms to ensure that the candidate solutions produced are feasible and satisfy all the constraints. The performance of the enhanced SA-based algorithm is demonstrated through two real-life UC problems in power systems. The results of the two studies are also compared with previous reported UC solution methods. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.