A Thermal Unit Commitment Approach based on a Bounded Quantum Evolutionary Algorithm

This paper introduces a new approach based on a quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (QEA) to solve unit commitment (UC) problems. The UC problem is a complicated nonlinear and mixed-integer combinatorial optimization problem with heavy constraints. This paper proposes a bounded quantum evolutionary algorithm (BQEA) to effectively solve the UC problems. The proposed BQEA adopts both the bounded rotation gate, which is simplified and improved to prevent premature convergence and increase the global search ability, and the increasing rotation angle approach to improve the search performance of the conventional QEA. Furthermore, it includes heuristic-based constraint treatment techniques to deal with the minimum up/down time and spinning reserve constraints in the UC problems. Since the excessive spinning reserve can incur high operation costs, the unit de-commitment strategy is also introduced to improve the solution quality. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed BQEA, it is applied to the large-scale power systems of up to 100-unit with 24-hour demand.