SECURITY CONSTRAINED HYDRO-THERMAL UNIT COMMITMENT FOR DIFFERENT HYDROLOGICAL SCENARIOS USING GENETIC ALGORITHM

The main objective of the Security Constrained Hydrothermal Unit Commitment (SCHTUC) is the optimal committing of the hydro and thermal units i.e., to minimize the total cost (which are very non-linear and non-convex) of thermal plants while satisfying the many hydro-thermal constraints. Such constraints, together with the nonlinear non-convex and mixed-integer objective function, make the search space extremely complex. The time of operation of the units is considered to be 24 h. To achieve this objective, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) with two new constraint handling repair mechanisms was applied. The proposed algorithm will be applied to the hydrothermal system, under different hydrological conditions, to prove i.e., confirmation of the initial hypothesis, which indicates that the total operating costs depend significantly on the hydrological conditions, i.e., the available volume of water and the inflows in the reservoirs of the hydropower plants. The proposed algorithm was applied on IEEE 30 bus system, but also tested on a benchmark system, and confirmed by comparison with other hybrid techniques such as PSO–GWO and DA-PSO. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is established by comparing it to these two hybrid algorithms.