A New Approach of Economic Dispatch Considering Prohibited Operating Zones and Ramp-Rate Limits Based on Genetic Algorithm

Unit Commitment is the problem which finds the most economic production for power generation, when the power consumption and different constraints of the power plants are known. Also, economic dispatch as the operation of power plants to produce energy at the lowest cost to reliably serve consumers, and considering any operational limits related to generation and transmission is one of the most important calculations in power system. There are a lot of papers and researches to modeling the real constraints of these two problems. Economic dispatch considering prohibited operating zones and ramp-rate limits is one of the most important branches related to economic dispatch. This paper presents an effective algorithm for solving economic dispatch problem in power systems with units which have prohibited operating zones constraints and ramp-rate limits based on genetic algorithm. The proposed approach is a two stage algorithm which has two main advantages. First, it reduces the total costs of operation, and secondly, it increases the probability of convergences the solutions. The proposed algorithm has been tested successfully on 15 and 40 units and has been compared with other algorithm. The test results verify the advantages of the proposed method comparing to other works.