Unit commitment and hydrothermal generation scheduling by multi-pass dynamic programming

The authors present an efficient technique for solving the weekly thermal unit commitment and hydrothermal generation scheduling problem known as multi-pass dynamic programming (MPDP). The MPDP technique can overcome the difficulties associated with the requirements of the long computation time and the large storage memory of conventional dynamic programming. The algorithm is tested on a power system with seven hydro units, one pumped storage plant, and forty thermal units. Solutions are reached within 40 min on a 16-MHz PC/AT and are consistent with engineering intuition. The reasonable results, the fast convergence, and small memory requirement make the algorithm suitable for practical systems with many generation units