In the deregulated electricity market, each
generating company has to maximize its own profit by
committing suitable generation schedule termed as profit
based unit commitment (PBUC). This article proposes a
Parallel Particle Swarm Optimization (PPSO) solution to the
PBUC problem. This method has better convergence
characteristics in obtaining optimum solution. The proposed
approach uses a cluster of computers performing parallel
operations in a distributed environment for obtaining the
PBUC solution. The time complexity and the solution quality
with respect to the number of processors in the cluster are
thoroughly tested. The method has been applied to 10 unit
system and the results show that the proposed PPSO in a
distributed cluster constantly outperforms the other methods
which are available in the literature.