PROMOTING THE APPLICATION OF EXPERT SYSTEMS IN SHORT-TERM UNIT COMMITMENT

This paper presents a heuristic approach to the short-term unit commit ment problem. First, it divides the generating units capacities into t hree categories, then it establishes a rough 24 hour-generation schedu le and finally, it performs the global optimization as an inference pr ocess. A prototype system is developed and tested on an IBM-386 person al computer using the C language. The ToolBook software is used to enh ance the graphics capability of the package. The primary advantage of the proposed method is featured by its short processing time for each schedule as it schedules the generation unit commitment for a typical system in less than 2 seconds. The same system is examined by dynamic programming with an average running time of 20 minutes on an IBM 386 p ersonal computer.