Unit commitment solved by multi colony ant optimization algorithm

WANG Wei， LI Ying-hao， GONG Xiang-yang， CAI Zhen-hua， ZHENG Chun-ying
（School of Electrical Engineering， Zhejiang University， Hangzhou 310027， China）

Abstract： Unit commitment（UC）has commonly been formulated as a large-scale，mixed-integer optimization problem which is with the characteristic of high-dimensional，discrete and nonlinear and is known as NP-hard problem in mathematics. In order to solve the problems of time-consuming and easy to fall into local optimum that the ant colony optimization algorithm（ACO）met，the multi colony ant optimization algorithms was investigated. After the analysis of the use of the multi colony ant optimization algorithms in unit commitment，the detect ant and ergate were presented beside the search ant，the new principles of information exchange were set，and the new update method for pheromone was established. The feasibility of the algorithm was verified，the rationality and effectiveness were analyzed by the modified IEEE30. The result shows that the proposed multi colony ant algorithm is reasonable and effective.
Key words： unit commitment（UC）；multi colony ant optimization algorithm（MCAO）；heuristic algorithm