SOLUTION APPROACHES FOR UNIT COMMITMENT PROBLEMS – AN ANALYSIS

Unit commitment (UC) problem is an important optimizing task for scheduling the on/off states of generating units in power system operation over a time horizon such that the power generation cost is minimized. Since, increasing the number of generating units makes it difficult to solve in practice, many approaches have been introduced to solve the UC problem. An effort to develop a unit commitment approach capable of handling large power systems consisting of both thermal and hydro generating units offers a large profitable return. In order to be feasible, the method to be developed must be flexible, efficient and reliable. In this paper, various proposed methods have been described along with their strengths and weaknesses. As all of these methods have some sort of weaknesses, a comprehensive algorithm that combines the strengths of different methods and overcomes each other's weaknesses would be a suitable approach for solving industry-grade unit commitment problem