Improving Large Scale Day-Ahead Security Constrained Unit Commitment Performance

As part of the day-ahead market clearing process, MISO solves one of the most challenging Security Constrained Unit Commitment (SCUC) models. With footprint expansions and increased activity from financial traders, the day-ahead market unit commitment encounters significant performance challenges from time to time. This paper reviews MISO's day-ahead market clearing process and identifies the factors contributing to these performance challenges. It then shares techniques that have been developed to overcome these challenges. Three alternative backup solving approaches were developed. An incremental solving algorithm is proposed to better handle the iterative market clearing process and to perform solution polishing and commitment reason identification. Numerical results based on MISO data are presented.