A New Approach Based on Benders Decomposition for Unit Commitment Problem

This study presents a new formulation based on generalized benders decomposition approach to solve thermal unit commitment problem. This new approach decomposes the problem into a master problem and a sub-problem. The master problem is an integer program and sub-problem is a nonlinear program. The master problem applies the integer programming method to solve (Unit Commitment) UC and finds proper on/off states of the units. In the proposed approach, the sub-problem is modeled as a nonlinear problem and it uses the outputs of master problem to form appropriate cuts and adds them to the master problem for solving the next iteration of UC. Appropriate formulations of constraints for both parts of problem are presented. The results obtained, considering a commonly used system, show the efficiency of this approach in comparison with other methods.