Fast Relax-and-Round Unit Commitment with Economic Horizons

TL;DR

This paper presents a fast, heuristic-based computational method for long-horizon unit commitment that efficiently handles large-scale hydro-generator scheduling, enabling horizon-aware economic decision-making with significant cost savings.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel, fast algorithm for hydro-unit commitment that is provably accurate and scalable to large systems, significantly improving runtime over existing methods.

Findings

Solves large-scale UC problems in about 1 minute on commodity hardware.

Increased planning horizon results in substantial operational cost savings.

Method is adaptable to different applications and compatible with existing solvers.

Abstract

We expand our novel computational method for unit commitment (UC) to include long-horizon planning. We introduce a fast novel algorithm to commit hydro-generators, provably accurately. We solve problems with thousands of generators at 5 minute market intervals. We show that our method can solve interconnect size UC problems in approximately 1 minute on a commodity hardware and that an increased planning horizon leads to sizable operational cost savings (our objective). This scale is infeasible for current state-of-the-art tools. We attain this runtime improvement by introducing a heuristic tailored for UC problems. Our method can be implemented using existing continuous optimization solvers and adapted for different applications. Combined, the two algorithms would allow an operator operating large systems with hydro units to make horizon-aware economic decisions.