A New Hybrid Binary-Real Coded Cuckoo Search and Tabu Search Algorithm for Solving the Unit-Commitment Problem

This paper proposes a new intelligent optimization approach to deal with the unit commitment (UC) problem by finding the optimal on/off states strategy of the units under the system constraints. The proposed method is a hybridization of the cuckoo search (CS) and the tabu search (TS) optimization techniques. The former is distinguished by its efficient global exploration mechanism, namely the levy flights, and the latter is a successful local search method. For this sake, a binary code is used for the status of units in the scheduled time horizon, and a real code is used to determine the generated power by the committed units. The proposed hybrid CS and TS (CS-TS) algorithm is used to solve the UC problem such that the CS guarantees the exploration of the whole search space, while the TS algorithm deals with the local search in order to avoid the premature convergence and prevent from trapping into local optima. The proposed method is applied to the IEEE standard systems of different scales ranging from 10 to 100 units. The results show clearly that the proposed method gives better quality solutions than the existing methods.