On units combination and commitment optimization for electric power production

Electric power system is one of the most important and complex engineering in modern society, supplying main and general power for social production and social life. Meanwhile, since it is a productive system with both high input and output, it has an obvious economic significance to improve its operating efficiency. For an example, an unit is 10 GW scale, if its standard coal consumption can be decreased with 1 g/kW. h, it can save about 5 000 tons standard coal per year. It will be discussed mainly that how to establish optimization model and its numerical algorithm for operating management of the electric power system. The idea on establishing optimization model is how to dispatch work state of units or power plants, so that total cost of fuel consumption for generation is reduced to the minimum. Here the dispatch is to decide which unit or plant to operate, which unit or plant to stop running, how much power should be generated for those operating units or plants at each given time interval.