Chaotic Imperialist Competitive Algorithm Solution for the Unit Commitment Problem

Chaotic imperialist competitive algo-rithms (CICA) are optimization approaches based on the proposed imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and orthogonal imperialist competitive algo-rithm (OICA) with chaotic local search (CLS). In this paper, a CICA method based on tent equation is developed to solve unit commitment (UC) problem. In the proposed method, an initial population called countries is coded by binary alphabet and then all the countries are coded as integers. In order to inves-tigate the efficiency of the proposed CICA, it is im-plemented on six test systems comprising 10, 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 generating units in one and seven-period day scheduling horizons. The simulation re-sults show that CICA is capable of obtaining good convergence property. The operating costs of CICA are lower than those of the original ICA and several previous reported methods in many cases and hence, CICA algorithms can provide competitive and eco-nomic solutions.