Power System Unit Commitment

This chapter introduces the key components of economic operation of a power system. These key components are unit commitment (UC), economic dispatch, and optimal power flow (OPF). The solutions from the unit commitment and economic dispatch based on a particular OPF determine the optimal generation schedule. Mathematically, the UC problem can be represented as a mixed integer programming (MIP) problem. Moreover, if the problem can be linearized, the problem can be represented as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem. Lagrange relaxation (LR) method is one of the prevailing methods applied to solve UC problems. Heuristic methods are also proposed for solving UC problems. The current implementation of the unit commitment problem faces several new challenges. Therefore, it becomes necessary to develop computational methods to scale the problem and to handle a huge amount of control variables.