Stochastic Hopfield artificial neural network for unit commitment and economic power dispatch

Abstract

This paper presents a Hopfield artificial neural network for unit commitment and economic power dispatch. The dual problem of unit commitment and economic power dispatch is an example of a constrained mixed-integer combinatorial optimization. Because of uncertainties in both the system load demand and unit availability, the unit commitment and economic power dispatch problem is stochastic. In this paper we model forced unit outages as independent Markov processes, and load demand as a normal Gaussian random variable. The (0,1) unit commitment-status variables and the hourly unit loading are modelled as sample functions of appropriate random processes. The problem variables over which the optimization is done are modelled as sample functions of random processes which are described by Ito stochastic differential equations. The method is illustrated by a simple example of a power system having three machines which are committed and dispatched over a four-hour period. In the method, unit commitment and economic dispatch are done simultaneously.