Multi-area unit commitment

The authors present a thermal unit commitment method for interconnected multiarea power systems. The method is a natural extension of the commitment utilization factor (CUF)-based single-area unit commitment method. CUF is extended to reflect the impact of multiarea transmission interconnection constraints on the utilization efficiency of committing a candidate unit at a given priority position. The multiarea CUF is used in conjunction with the average full load cost. (AFLC) to efficiently determine the optimal or a near-optimal multiarea priority commitment order. This priority order is then used to generate the multiarea unit commitment schedule. The excellent quality of the results of the CUF-based multiarea method is consistent with that of the previously reported single-area method