SFLA to Solve Short Term Thermal Unit Commitment Problem with Startup and Shutdown Ramp Limits

This paper presents an efficient integer coded Shuffled Frog Leaping Approach (SFLA) to solve the Unit Commitment Problem (UCP) for thermal generating units with considering startup and shutdown ramp limits. The conventional method of generation scheduling does not consider the Startup and shutdown ramp limits. The generation scheduling for large power system without considering the ramp limits in start and shut down ramp limit does not give the practical value. The minimization of operating cost is the main objective of the proposed work and its used to determine the optimal generation of the committed units while considering equality & inequality constraints like load demand, generation limit, minimum up, minimum down time, spinning reserve and other at each hour time interval especially with the inclusion of Startup and shutdown ramp limits. The solution obtained from two cases using proposed SFLA Algorithm is tested and is compared with other conventional methods.