Profit based unit commitment in competitive markets

The unit commitment of a thermal power producer is addressed which is based on the price behavior in the spot market. The classical unit commitment objective has been redefined to a profit-maximizing objective to match the competitive market. A new method using heuristic technique in coordination with dynamic programming and nonlinear programming has been proposed to solve the unit-scheduling problem. The proposed technique is first compared with the available techniques and is subsequently applied to the profit based unit commitment (PBUC) problem. The results are compared to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique and the implications of PBUC in the competitive market are discussed.