A Metaheuristic Approach to the Multi-Objective Unit Commitment Problem Combining Economic and Environmental Criteria

Luís A. C. Roque, Dalila B. M. M. Fontes and Fernando A. C. C. Fontes
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Luís A. C. Roque: Departamento de Matemática, Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, 4200-072 Porto, Portugal
Dalila B. M. M. Fontes: LIAAD-INESC-TEC, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Tecnologia e Ciência, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal
Fernando A. C. C. Fontes: SYSTEC-ISR-Porto, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal

Energies, 2017, vol. 10, issue 12, 1-25

Abstract: We consider a Unit Commitment Problem (UCP) addressing not only the economic objective of minimizing the total production costs—as is done in the standard UCP—but also addressing environmental concerns. Our approach utilizes a multi-objective formulation and includes in the objective function a criterion to minimize the emission of pollutants. Environmental concerns are having a significant impact on the operation of power systems related to the emissions from fossil-fuelled power plants. However, the standard UCP, which minimizes just the total production costs, is inadequate to address environmental concerns. We propose to address the UCP with environmental concerns as a multi-objective problem and use a metaheuristic approach combined with a non-dominated sorting procedure to solve it. The metaheuristic developed is a variant of an evolutionary algorithm, known as Biased Random Key Genetic Algorithm. Computational experiments have been carried out on benchmark problems with up to 100 generation units for a 24 h scheduling horizon. The performance of the method, as well as the quality, diversity and the distribution characteristics of the solutions obtained are analysed. It is shown that the method proposed compares favourably against alternative approaches in most cases analysed.

Keywords: pollutant emissions; genetic algorithm; multi-objective optimization; unit commitment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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