A tight MIP formulation of the unit commitment problem with start-up and shut-down constraints

This paper provides the convex hull description for the following basic operating constraints of a single power generation unit in Unit Commitment (UC) problems: 1) generation limits, 2) startup and shutdown capabilities, and 3) minimum up and down times. Although the model does not consider some crucial constraints, such as ramping, the proposed constraints can be used as the core of any UC formulation, thus tightening the final UC model. We provide evidence that dramatic improvements in computational time are obtained by solving a self-UC problem for different case studies.