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Unit commitment (UC) problem is an important optimizing task for scheduling the on/off states of generating units in power system operation over a time horizon such that the power generation cost is minimized. Since, increasing the number of generating units makes it difficult to solve in practice, many approaches have been introduced to solve the UC problem. This paper introduces an improved version of the binary quantum-inspired gravitational search algorithm (BQIGSA) and proposes a new approach to solve the UC problem based on the improved BQIGSA, called QGSA-UC. The proposed approach is applied to unit commitment problems with the number of generating units in the range of 10–120 along with 24-h scheduling horizon and is compared with nine state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, four different versions of gravitational approach are implemented for solving the UC problem and compared …