Fast Relax-and-Round Unit Commitment with Economic Horizons
This enables operators of large power systems with hydro units to make horizon-aware economic decisions, representing a strong specific gain in computational efficiency.
The authors tackled the unit commitment problem for large-scale power systems with hydro-generators by introducing a fast algorithm that solves interconnect size problems in about 1 minute on commodity hardware, leading to sizable operational cost savings with increased planning horizons.
We expand our novel computational method for unit commitment (UC) to include long-horizon planning. We introduce a fast novel algorithm to commit hydro-generators, provably accurately. We solve problems with thousands of generators at 5 minute market intervals. We show that our method can solve interconnect size UC problems in approximately 1 minute on a commodity hardware and that an increased planning horizon leads to sizable operational cost savings (our objective). This scale is infeasible for current state-of-the-art tools. We attain this runtime improvement by introducing a heuristic tailored for UC problems. Our method can be implemented using existing continuous optimization solvers and adapted for different applications. Combined, the two algorithms would allow an operator operating large systems with hydro units to make horizon-aware economic decisions.