On Mixed-Integer Programming Formulations for the Unit Commitment Problem

TLDR

Unit commitment formulations have been a highly active research area for the past decade due to their critical role in power grid operations, and this paper serves as a capstone to that work. The authors aim to give a comprehensive overview of mixed‑integer programming formulations for unit commitment and to introduce additional formulations for generator production limits and piecewise linear costs. They provide publicly available reference implementations, computationally evaluate existing and novel formulations on academic and real‑world instances, and develop new formulations combining literature components with their own contributions. Their experiments show that the new composite formulations substantially improve performance, establishing a new state‑of‑the‑art unit‑commitment model.

Abstract

We provide a comprehensive overview of mixed-integer programming formulations for the unit commitment (UC) problem. UC formulations have been an especially active area of research over the past 12 years due to their practical importance in power grid operations, and this paper serves as a capstone for this line of work. We additionally provide publicly available reference implementations of all formulations examined. We computationally test existing and novel UC formulations on a suite of instances drawn from both academic and real-world data sources. Driven by our computational experience from this and previous work, we contribute some additional formulations for both generator production upper bounds and piecewise linear production costs. By composing new UC formulations using existing components found in the literature and new components introduced in this paper, we demonstrate that performance can be significantly improved—and in the process, we identify a new state-of-the-art UC formulation.