The increasing penetration of wind generation has led to significant improvements in unit commitment models. However, long-term capacity planning methods have not been similarly modified to address the challenges of a system with a large fraction of generation from variable sources. Designing future capacity mixes with adequate flexibility requires an embedded approximation of the unit commitme...

Abstract: One of the successful approaches to unit commitment is the dynamic programming algorithm (DP). Dynamic programming has many advantages over the enumeration scheme, the chief advantage being a reduction in the dimensionality of the problem. It is one of the refined algorithm design standards and is powerful tool which yields definitive algorithms for various types of optimization probl...

This two-paper series proposes a novel deterministic optimization approach for the Unit Commitment problem (UC), more specifically for the Security Constrained Unit Commitment problem (SCUC) addressing thermal generating units. In the first part, a suitable mathematical programming model is presented, which contemplates all the inherent constraints and a single set of binary variables, i.e. the...

The paper represents a genetic algorithm (GA) solution to the unit commitment problem for power generation in thermal power plant. GAs are general optimization techniques based on principles inspired from the biological evolution, using metaphors of mechanism such as natural selection, genetic recombination and survival of the fittest. A simple GA implementation using the standard crossover and...

In this paper, a cooperative metaheuristic for the solution of the Unit Commitment problem is presented. This problem is known to be a large scale, mixed integer problem. Due to combinatorial complexity, the exact solution is often intractable. Thus, a metaheuristic based method has to be used to compute a near optimal solution with low computation times. A new approach is presented here. The m...

The advent of High Performance Computing (HPC) has provided the computational capacity required for power system operators (SO) to obtain solutions in the least time to highly-complex applications, i.e., Unit Commitment (UC). The UC problem, which attempts to schedule the least-cost combination of generating units to meet the load, is increasing in complexity and problem size due to deployments...

In this paper we present a formulation of the unit commitment problem with AC power flow constraints. It is solved by Benders’ decomposition in which master formulated as mixed-integer linearization generation constraints for improved convergence. Semidefinite programming relaxation rectangular optimal used subproblem, providing somewhat conservative cuts. Numerical case studies, including 6-bu...

This paper demonstrates how a probabilistic criterion based on the full capacity outage probability distribution (e.g., LOLP) could be integrated into the unit commitment (UC) optimization using simple statistical approximation. While this provides a direct and computationally cheaper means as compared to a recently published approach to locating the globally optimal SR allocation (and associat...

The Unit Commitment Problem (UCP) is an important category of power planning problems. The purpose of UCP is to determine when to start up and shut down the generator units and how to dispatch the committed units to meet the electricity demands, ancillary services requirements and security constraints. In this paper, we improve the traditional Lagrange Relaxation (LR) approach and analyze the e...