Unit commitment by an improved binary quantum GSA

Unit commitment (UC) problem is an important optimizing task for scheduling the on/off states of generating units in power system operation over a time horizon such that the power generation cost is minimized. Since, increasing the number of generating units makes it difficult to solve in practice, many approaches have been introduced to solve the UC problem. This paper introduces an improved version of the binary quantum-inspired gravitational search algorithm (BQIGSA) and proposes a new approach to solve the UC problem based on the improved BQIGSA, called QGSA-UC. The proposed approach is applied to unit commitment problems with the number of generating units in the range of 10120 along with 24-h scheduling horizon and is compared with nine state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, four different versions of gravitational approach are implemented for solving the UC problem and compared with those obtained by QGSA-UC. Comparative results clearly reveal the effectiveness of the proposed approach and show that it can be used as a reliable tool to solve UC problem. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.