Publisher's Synopsis
POWER SYSTEM DEREGULATION (Unit Commitment Problem) is a technical description of deregulated power systems while scheduling the operation of generating units called unit commitment problem. This book explains some of the conventional and artificial intelligence techniques to solve the unit commitment problem under deregulation. Coming to some of the recent developments in deregulated energy industry, one of the most important global energy developments in the last century is deregulation and restructuring of the electricity supply industry. The major tasks in the electric power generation are the optimal operations and planning of power systems. The new market mechanisms have changed the economics of power generation. Generation companies can now consider a schedule that produces less than the predicted load demand and create the maximum profit. This problem is referred as profit based unit commitment (PBUC) problem and is more difficult to solve than traditional unit commitment problem. The PBUC can be solved using both conventional methods and Artificial intelligence techniques. The main disadvantage of conventional methods like dynamic programming and lagrangian relaxation are due to the curse of dimensionality with increase in number of generating units, they take huge computational time to obtain an optimal solution and also poor convergence. Artificial Intelligence techniques attract much attention because of their ability to search not only local optimal solutions but also global optimal solution and their ability to deal with various difficult nonlinear constraints.
