A Space Reduction Heuristic for Thermal Unit Commitment Considering Ramp Constraints and Large-Scale Generation Systems

Abstract

This paper expands the research around a recently proposed method to reduce the search space region for thermal unit commitment problems. The importance of such techniques comes from the combinatorial explosion regarding the variables of the problem when there are a large quantity of generating units in the system. The proposed heuristic approach utilizes sensitivity indices to gather information about the system and fix many of the binary decision variables over the planning horizon. This work further explores the method by demonstrating its effectiveness in large-scale systems subjected to ramp constraints. Despite the significantly increased complexity, the results of this paper indicate that the method can achieve high quality solutions notably faster than other approaches from the literature.

Keywords

• thermal unit commitment
• combinatorial optimization
• search space reduction
• heuristic