A new unit commitment method

Abstract

This paper introduces a new unit commitment method based on a decommitment procedure for solving the power system resource scheduling problem. From an initial schedule of all available units committed over the study period, a 'one-at-a-time' unit decommitment is accomplished by dynamic programming according to some specified economic criteria. The decommitment process continues until no further reduction in total cost is possible, or the unit schedules of two consecutive iterations over the time period remain unchanged without any violation of the spinning reserve constraint. Two criteria for decommiting a unit are introduced and described in detail. Comparisons of the proposed unit commitment method with the Lagrangian relaxation (LR) approach and Fred Lee's sequential unit commitment method (SUC) demonstrate the potential benefits of the proposed approach for power system operations planning.