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Title: Exploiting Identical Generators in Unit Commitment

Journal Article · · IEEE Transactions on Power Systems
 [1];  [1];  [2]
  1. Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States)
  2. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

Here, we present sufficient conditions under which thermal generators can be aggregated in mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulations of the unit commitment (UC) problem, while maintaining feasibility and optimality for the original disaggregated problem. Aggregating thermal generators with identical characteristics (e.g., minimum/maximum power output, minimum up/down-time, and cost curves) into a single unit reduces redundancy in the search space induced by both exact symmetry (permutations of generator schedules) and certain classes of mutually non-dominated solutions. We study the impact of aggregation on two large-scale UC instances, one from the academic literature and another based on real-world operator data. Our computational tests demonstrate that when present, identical generators can negatively affect the performance of modern MILP solvers on UC formulations. Further, we show that our reformation of the UC MILP through aggregation is an effective method for mitigating this source of computational difficulty.

Research Organization:
Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States); Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC04-94AL85000; SC0018175
OSTI ID:
1421648
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 2339861
Report Number(s):
SAND-2018-0031J; 659726
Journal Information:
IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Vol. 33, Issue 4; ISSN 0885-8950
Publisher:
IEEECopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 12 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

References (23)

Tight polyhedral approximation for mixed-integer linear programming unit commitment formulations journal November 2012
Tighter Approximated MILP Formulations for Unit Commitment Problems journal February 2009
A computational comparison of reformulations of the perspective relaxation: SOCP vs. cutting planes journal May 2009
Solving unit commitment problems with general ramp constraints journal June 2008
Large-scale decentralized unit commitment journal December 2015
Projected mixed integer programming formulations for unit commitment problem journal June 2015
Tight Relaxation Method for Unit Commitment Problem Using Reformulation and Lift-and-Project journal January 2015
Symmetry breaking in MILP formulations for Unit Commitment problems journal February 2016
Toward scalable stochastic unit commitment: Part 2: solver configuration and performance assessment journal April 2015
Orbital branching journal March 2009
Stochastic Joint Optimization of Wind Generation and Pumped-Storage Units in an Electricity Market journal May 2008
Impact of variable generation in generation resource planning models conference July 2010
Impact of unit commitment constraints on generation expansion planning with renewables conference July 2011
Lagrangian heuristics based on disaggregated bundle methods for hydrothermal unit commitment journal February 2003
Tight Mixed Integer Linear Programming Formulations for the Unit Commitment Problem journal February 2012
A tight MIP formulation of the unit commitment problem with start-up and shut-down constraints journal April 2016
Perspective cuts for a class of convex 0–1 mixed integer programs journal July 2005
Tight and Compact MILP Formulation for the Thermal Unit Commitment Problem journal November 2013
Tight MIP formulations of the power-based unit commitment problem journal May 2015
Modified orbital branching for structured symmetry with an application to unit commitment journal September 2014
Min-up/min-down polytopes journal June 2004
A Computationally Efficient Mixed-Integer Linear Formulation for the Thermal Unit Commitment Problem journal August 2006
A genetic algorithm solution to the unit commitment problem journal January 1996

Cited By (3)

Sub-Symmetry-Breaking Inequalities for ILP with Structured Symmetry book January 2019
Orbitopal fixing for the full (sub-)orbitope and application to the Unit Commitment Problem journal December 2019
Orbitopal fixing for the full (sub)-orbitope and application to the Unit Commitment Problem preprint January 2017

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