Promoting the application of expert systems in short-term unit commitment

A heuristic approach to the short-term unit commitment problem is presented. The generating unit's capacities are divided into thee categories, and then a rough 24 h-generation schedule is established. The global optimization is performed as an inference process. A prototype system is developed and tested on an IBM-386 personal computer using the C language. The ToolBook software is used to enhance the graphics capability of the package. The primary advantage of the proposed method is its short processing time for each schedule, as it schedules the generation unit commitment for a typical system in less than 2 s. The same system is examined by dynamic programming with an average running time of 20 min on an IBM 386 personal computer.>