Solution of the unit commitment problem by the method of unit periods

A heuristic solution for short-term thermal unit commitment is presented. The algorithm has been developed as a FORTRAN-based production-type program. Tests of this algorithm on data provided by a midwest utility have demonstrated satisfactory results. The proposed algorithm produces the same unit commitment schedule as a standard dynamic programming (DP)-based algorithm in one fourth the computation time for the DP-based algorithm. The algorithm is nearly linear with the number of unit periods. A unit period is defined as the online duration time versus operation level for each unit. Operating system restrictions limit the prototype to 30 thermal power units as implemented on a PS/2 model 50 personal computer