Consideration of ramp rate constraints in unit commitment using simulated annealing

This paper proposes a simulated annealing algorithm combined with a dynamic economic dispatch to consider the ramp rate constraints in the unit commitment problem. Simulated annealing is used for the scheduling of the generating units, while the economic load dispatch is performed dynamically through a quadratic programming routine. The inclusion of ramp rates is achieved by performing either a backward or a forward sequence of conventional economic dispatches with modified limits on the generators, depending on the candidate solution (schedule) provided by the simulated annealing algorithm. The proposed algorithm provides feasible near optimal solutions in reasonable time. Numerical simulations have proved the effectiveness of the proposed model.