Unit commitment problem in electrical

power production
The unit commitment problem (UC) in electrical power production is a large family of mathematical optimization
problems where the production of a set of electrical generators is coordinated in order to achieve some common
target, usually either match the energy demand at minimum cost or maximize revenues from energy production. This
is necessary because it is difficult to store electrical energy on a scale comparable with normal consumption; hence,
each (substantial) variation in the consumption must be matched by a corresponding variation of the production.

Coordinating generation units is a difficult task for a number of reasons:

the number of units can be large (hundreds or thousands);

there are several types of units, with significantly different energy production costs and constraints about how
power can be produced;
generation is distributed across a vast geographical area (e.g., a country), and therefore the response of the
electrical grid, itself a highly complex system, has to be taken into account: even if the production levels of all
units are known, checking whether the load can be sustained and what the losses are requires highly complex
power flow computations.
Because the relevant details of the electrical system vary greatly worldwide, there are many variants of the UC
problem, which are often very difficult to solve. This is also so because, since some units require quite a long time
(many hours) to start up or shut down, the decisions need be taken well in advance (usually, the day before), which
implies that these problems have to be solved within tight time limits (several minutes to a few hours). UC is therefore
one of the fundamental problems in power system management and simulation. It has been studied for many
years,[1][2] and still is one of the most significant energy optimization problems. Recent surveys on the subject[3][4]
count many hundreds of scientific articles devoted to the problem. Furthermore, several commercial products
comprise specific modules for solving UC,[5] or are even entirely devoted to its solution.[6]

Contents
Elements of unit commitment problems
Management objectives
Types of production units
Electrical grid models
Uncertainty in unit commitment problems
References
External links

Elements of unit commitment problems

There are many different UC problems, as the electrical system is structured and governed differently across the
world. Common elements are:

A time horizon along which the decisions have to be made, sampled at a finite number of time instants. This is
usually one or two days, up to a week, where instants are usually hours or half-hours; less frequently, 15 or 5
 minutes. Hence, time instants are typically between 24 and around 2000.
A set of generating units with the corresponding energy production cost and/or emission curves, and (complex)
technical constraints.
A representation of the significant part of the grid network.
A (forecasted) load profile to be satisfied, i.e., the net amount of energy to be delivered to each node of the grid
network at each time instant.
Possibly, a set of reliability constraints[7] ensuring that demand will be satisfied even if some unforeseen events
occur.
Possibly, financial and/or regulatory conditions[8] (energy revenues, market operation constraints, financial
instruments, ...).
The decisions that have to be taken usually comprise:

commitment decisions: whether a unit is producing energy at any time instant;

production decisions: how much energy a unit is producing at any time instant;
network decisions: how much energy is flowing (and in which direction) on each branch of the transmission
and/or distribution grid at any given time instant.
While the above features are usually present, there are many combinations and many different cases. Among these we
mention:

whether the units and the grid are all handled by a Monopolistic Operator (MO),[9] or a separate Transmission
System Operator (TSO) manages the grid providing fair and not discriminatory access to Generating Companies
(GenCos) that compete to satisfy the production on the (or, most often, several interconnected) energy market(s);
the different kinds of energy production units, such as thermal/nuclear ones, hydro-electric ones, and renewable
sources (wind, solar, ...);
which units can be modulated, i.e., their produced energy can be decided by the operator (albeit subject to the
technical constraints of the unit), as opposed to it being entirely dictated by external factors such as weather
conditions;
the level of detail at which the working of the electrical grid must be considered, ranging from basically ignoring it
to considering the possibility of dynamically opening (interrupting) a line in order to optimally change the energy
routing on the grid.[10]

Management objectives
The objectives of UC depend on the aims of the actor for which it is solved. For a MO, this is basically to minimize
energy production costs while satisfying the demand; reliability and emissions are usually treated as constraints. In a
free-market regime, the aim is rather to maximize energy production profits, i.e., the difference between revenues
(due to selling energy) and costs (due to producing it). If the GenCo is a price maker, i.e., it has sufficient size to
influence market prices, it may in principle perform strategic bidding[11] in order to improve its profits. This means
bidding its production at high cost so as to raise market prices, losing market share but retaining some because,
essentially, there is not enough generation capacity. For some regions this may be due to the fact that there is not
enough grid network capacity to import energy from nearby regions with available generation capacity.[12] While the
electrical markets are highly regulated in order to, among other things, rule out such behavior, large producers can
still benefit from simultaneously optimizing the bids of all their units to take into account their combined effect on
market prices.[13] On the contrary, price takers can simply optimize each generator independently, as, not having a
significant impact on prices, the corresponding decisions are not correlated.[14]

Types of production units

In the context of UC, generating units are usually classified as:

Thermal units, which comprise nuclear ones, that burn some sort of fuel to produce electricity. They are subject to
numerous complex technical constraints, among which we mention minimum up/down time, ramp up/down rate,
 modulation/stability (a unit cannot change its production level too many times[15]), and start-up/shut-down ramp
rate (when starting/stopping, a unit must follow a specific power curve which may depend on how long the plant
has been offline/online[16]). Therefore, optimizing even a single unit is in principle already a complex problem
which requires specific techniques.[17]
Hydro units, that generate energy by harvesting water potential energy, are often organized into systems of
connected reservoirs called hydro valleys. Because water released by an upstream reservoir reaches the
downstream one (after some time), and therefore becomes available to generate energy there, decisions on the
optimal production must be taken for all units simultaneously, which makes the problem rather difficult even if no
(or little) thermal production is involved,[18] even more so if the complete electrical system is considered.[19]
Hydro units may include pumped-storage units, where energy can be spent to pump water uphill. This is the only
current technology capable of storing enough (potential) energy to be significant at the typical level of the UC
problem. Hydro units are subject to complex technical constraints. The amount of energy generated by turbining
some amount of water is not constant, but it depends on the water head which in turn depends on previous
decisions. The relationship is nonlinear and nonconvex, making the problem particularly difficult to solve.[20]
Renewable generation units, such as wind farms, solar plants, run-of-river hydro units (without a dedicated
reservoir, and therefore whose production is dictated by the flowing water), and geothermal units. Most of these
cannot be modulated, and several are also intermittent, i.e., their production is difficult to accurately forecast well
in advance. In UC, these units do not really correspond to decisions, since they cannot be influenced. Rather,
their production is considered fixed and added to that of the other sources. The substantial increase of
intermittent renewable generation in recent years has significantly increased uncertainty in the net load (demand
minus production that cannot be modulated), which has challenged the traditional view that the forecasted load in
UC is accurate enough.[21]

Electrical grid models

There are three different ways in which the energy grid is represented within a UC:

In the single bus approximation the grid is ignored: demand is considered to be satisfied whenever total
production equals total demand, irrespective of their geographical location.
In the DC approximation only Kirchhoff's current law is modeled; this corresponds to reactive power flow being
neglected, the voltage angles differences being considered small, and the angle voltage profile being assumed
constant;
In the full AC model the complete Kirchhoff laws are used: this results in highly nonlinear and nonconvex
constraints in the model.
When the full AC model is used, UC actually incorporates the optimal power flow problem, which is already a
nonconvex nonlinear problem.

Recently, the traditional "passive" view of the energy grid in UC has been challenged. In a fixed electrical network
currents cannot be routed, their behavior being entirely dictated by nodal power injection: the only way to modify the
network load is therefore to change nodal demand or production, for which there is limited scope. However, a
somewhat counter-intuitive consequence of Kirchhoff laws is that interrupting a line (maybe even a congested one)
causes a global re-routing of electrical energy and may therefore improve grid performances. This has led to defining
the Optimal Transmission Switching problem,[10] whereby some of the lines of the grid can be dynamically opened
and closed across the time horizon. Incorporating this feature in the UC problem makes it difficult to solve even with
the DC approximation, even more so with the full AC model.[22]

Uncertainty in unit commitment problems

A troubling consequence of the fact that UC needs be solved well in advance to the actual operations is that the future
state of the system is not known exactly, and therefore needs be estimated. This used to be a relatively minor problem
when the uncertainty in the system was only due to variation of users' demand, which on aggregate can be forecasted
quite effectively,[23][24] and occurrence of lines or generators faults, which can be dealt with by well established rules
(spinning reserve). However, in recent years the production from intermittent renewable production sources has
significantly increased. This has, in turn, very significantly increased the impact of uncertainty in the system, so that
ignoring it (as traditionally done by taking average point estimates) risks significant cost increases.[21] This had made
it necessary to resort to appropriate mathematical modeling techniques to properly take uncertainty into account,
such as:

Robust optimization approaches;

Scenario optimization approaches;
Chance-constrained optimization approaches.
The combination of the (already, many) traditional forms of UC problems with the several (old and) new forms of
uncertainty gives rise to the even larger family of Uncertain Unit Commitment[4] (UUC) problems, which are currently
at the frontier of applied and methodological research.

References
1. C.J. Baldwin, K.M. Dale, R.F. Dittrich. A study of the economic shutdown of generating units in daily dispatch.
Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers Power Apparatus and Systems, Part III,
78(4):1272–1282, 1959.
2. J.F. Bard. Short-term scheduling of thermal-electric generators using Lagrangian relaxation. Operations
Research 1338 36(5):765–766, 1988.
3. N.P. Padhy. Unit commitment – a bibliographical survey, IEEE Transaction On Power Systems 19(2):1196–
1205, 2004.
4. M. Tahanan, W. van Ackooij, A. Frangioni, F. Lacalandra. Large-scale Unit Commitment under uncertainty, 4OR
13(2), 115–171, 2015. (https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10288-014-0279-y)
5. PLEXOS® Integrated Energy Model (http://energyexemplar.com/software/plexos-desktop-edition)
6. Power optimization (http://www.powerop.co.uk)
7. M. Shahidehpour, H. Yamin, and Z. Li. Market Operations in Electric Power Systems: Forecasting, Scheduling,
and Risk Management, Wiley-IEEE Press, 2002.
8. C. Harris. Electricity markets: Pricing, structures and Economics, volume 565 of The Wiley Finance Series. John
Wiley and Sons, 2011.
9. A.J. Conejo and F.J. Prieto. Mathematical programming and electricity markets, TOP 9(1):1–53, 2001.
10. E.B. Fisher, R.P. O'Neill, M.C. Ferris. Optimal transmission switching, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems
23(3):1346–1355, 2008.
11. A.K. David, F. Wen. Strategic bidding in competitive electricity markets: a literature survey In Proceedings IEEE
PES Summer Meeting 4, 2168–2173, 2001.
12. T. Peng and K. Tomsovic. Congestion influence on bidding strategies in an electricity market, IEEE Transactions
on Power Systems 18(3):1054–1061, August 2003.
13. A.J. Conejo, J. Contreras, J.M. Arroyo, S. de la Torre. Optimal response of an oligopolistic generating company to
a competitive pool-based electric power market, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems 17(2):424–430, 2002.
14. J.M. Arroyo, A.J. Conejo. Optimal response of a thermal unit to an electricity spot market, IEEE Transactions on
Power Systems 15(3):1098–1104, 2000.
15. J. Batut and A. Renaud. Daily scheduling with transmission constraints: A new class of algorithms, IEEE
Transactions on Power Systems 7(3):982–989, 1992.
16. G. Morales-España, J.M. Latorre, A. Ramos. Tight and Compact MILP Formulation of Start-Up and Shut-Down
Ramping in Unit Commitment, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems 28(2), 1288–1296, 2013.
17. A. Frangioni, C. Gentile. Solving Nonlinear Single-Unit Commitment Problems with Ramping Constraints,
Operations Research 54(4), 767–775, 2006.
18. E.C. Finardi and E.L. Da Silva. Solving the hydro unit commitment problem via dual decomposition and
sequential quadratic programming, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems 21(2):835–844, 2006.
19. F.Y.K. Takigawa, E.L. da Silva, E.C. Finardi, and R.N. Rodrigues. Solving the hydrothermal scheduling problem
considering network constraints., Electric Power Systems Research 88:89–97, 2012.
20. A. Borghetti, C. D’Ambrosio, A. Lodi, S. Martello. A MILP approach for short-term hydro scheduling and unit
commitment with head-dependent reservoir, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems 23(3):1115–1124, 2008.
21. A. Keyhani, M.N. Marwali, and M. Dai. Integration of Green and Renewable Energy in Electric Power Systems,
Wiley, 2010.
22. K.W. Hedman, M.C. Ferris, R.P. O’Neill, E.B. Fisher, S.S. Oren. Co-optimization of generation unit commitment
and transmission switching with n − 1 reliability, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems 25(2):1052–1063, 2010.
23. E.A. Feinberg, D. Genethliou. Load Forecasting, in Applied Mathematics for Restructured Electric Power
Systems, J.H. Chow , F.F. Wu, and J. Momoh eds., Springer, 269–285, 2005
24. H. Hahn, S. Meyer-Nieberg, S. Pickl. Electric load forecasting methods: Tools for decision making, European
Journal of Operational Research 199(3), 902–907, 2009

Vikram Kumar Kamboj, S. K. Bath, J. S. Dhillon, “Solution of non-convex economic load dispatch problem using Grey
Wolf Optimizer”, Neural Computing and Applications (ISSN 1433-3058 (https://www.worldcat.org/search?fq=x0:jrnl
&q=n2:1433-3058)), Vol.25, No. 5, July 2015. DOI: 10.1007/s00521-015-1934-8.

External links
A description of the role of unit commitment problems in the overall context of power system management can be
found in the Energy Optimization Wiki (http://www.energy-opt.eu/wiki) developed by the COST TD1207 project.

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