Optimal thermal generating unit commitment of large power system: a novel approach

This paper presents a new efficient solution approach for solving the unit commitment schedule of thermal generating units of a realistic large scale power system. The approach is based on the equivalencing like concept of network reduction which reduces the number of units in the large power system to the lowest possible number according to their fuel/generation cost characteristics. The reduced system is then solved and from that overall solution to the original unit commitment problem of the entire system is obtained. Test results for real-life systems of up to 79 units and comparisons with results obtained using Lagrangian relaxation and truncated dynamic programming (DP-TC) are also reported