This paper presents a new approach via composite cost function to solve the unit commitment problem. The unit commitment problem involves determining the start-up and shut-down schedules for generating units to meet the forecasted demand at the minimum cost. The commitment schedule must satisfy the other constraints such as the generating limits, spinning reserve, minimum up and down time, ramp level and individual units. The proposed algorithm gives the committed units and economic load

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... h for each specific hour of operation. Numerical simulations were carried out using three cases: four-generator, seven-generator, and ten-generator thermal unit power systems over a 24 h period. The produced schedule was compared with several other methods, such as Dynamic programming, Branch and bound, Ant colony system, and traditional Tabu search. The result demonstrated the accuracy of the proposed method.