With the fast-paced changing technologies in the power industry, new power references addressing new technologies are coming to the market. So there is an urgent need to keep track of international experiences and activities taking place in the field of modern unit-commitment (UC) problem. This paper gives a bibliographical survey, mathematical formulations, and general backgrounds of research and developments in the field of UC problem for past 35 years based on more than 150 published articles. The collected literature has been divided into many sections, so that new researchers do not face any difficulty in carrying out research in the area of next-generation UC problem under both the regulated and deregulated power industry.

Economic load dispatch (ELD) and economic emission dispatch (EED) have been applied to obtain optimal fuel cost and optimal emission of generating units, respectively. Combined economic emission dispatch (CEED) problem is obtained by considering both the economy and emission objectives. This biobjective CEED problem is converted into a single objective function using a price penalty factor approach. A novel modified price penalty factor is proposed to solve the CEED problem. In this paper, evolutionary computation (EC) methods such as genetic algorithm (GA), micro GA (MGA), and evolutionary programming (EP) are applied to obtain ELD solutions for three-, six-, and 13-unit systems. Investigations showed that EP was better among EC methods in solving the ELD problem. EP-based CEED problem has been tested on IEEE 14-, 30-, and 118-bus systems with and without line flow constraints. A nonlinear scaling factor is also included in EP algorithm to improve the convergence performance for the 13 units and IEEE test systems. The solutions obtained are quite encouraging and useful in the economic emission environment.

This work presents both application and comparison of the metaheuristic techniques to generation expansion planning (GEP) problem. The Metaheuristic techniques such as the genetic algorithm, differential evolution, evolutionary programming, evolutionary strategy, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, tabu search, simulated annealing, and hybrid approach are applied to solve GEP problem. The original GEP problem is modified using the proposed methods virtual mapping procedure (VMP) and penalty factor approach (PFA), to improve the efficiency of the metaheuristic techniques. Further, intelligent initial population generation (IIPG), is introduced in the solution techniques to reduce the computational time. The VMP, PFA, and IIPG are used in solving all the three test systems. The GEP problem considered synthetic test systems for 6-year, 14-year, and 24-year planning horizon having five types of candidate units. The results obtained by all these proposed techniques are compared and validated against conventional dynamic programming and the effectiveness of each proposed methods has also been illustrated in detail.