Hamidreza Arasteh - Power Systems Operation and Planning Research Department, Niroo Research Institute, Tehran, Iran
Hamed Mirsaeedi - Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Tehran

The unit commitment (UC) problem has always been considered as one of the main activities by the system planners. Due to the non-linear and complex nature of the UC, different optimization approaches have been presented to solve the problem. In recent years, metaheuristic algorithms have been attracted because of their efficiency to optimize complex problems. This paper combines the concepts of two algorithms, i.e., the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) in a parallel manner and proposes a mixed GA-PSO method to optimize the UC problem. The simulation results have justified the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method, compared to the individual methods

parallel optimization, unit commitment, particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithm