Robust n–k contingency constrained unit commitment with ancillary service demand response program

Today, many Independent System Operators (ISOs) establish programs to manipulate the reserve provided by Demand Response (DR) in ancillary service markets. In this study, Ancillary Service DR (ASDR) programs, recently introduced by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is integrated to an n-k Contingency Constrained Unit Commitment problem to investigate the capability of the DR Providers (DRPs), newly added ancillary market participants, in mitigating the impacts of simultaneous multiple contingencies in a power system. In the proposed model, an n-k security criterion by which power balance constraint is satisfied under any contingency state comprising simultaneous outages in generation units is investigated in the presence of the ASDR programs. Demand side reserve is supplied by DRPs, which have the responsibility of aggregating and managing customer responses to offer a bid-quantity to the ISO. The proposed formulation is a Mixed Integer Programming problem based on primal-dual optimisation, reported recently in literature. In addition, a detailed discussion about versatile effects of ASDR programs on n-k security criterion is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model.