Generalizing Unit Commitment Problem Solving via SAT-based Decoupling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a SAT-based reduction method that decouples the unit commitment problem algorithm from specific variants, enabling broad applicability and improved solution quality across diverse power system scenarios.

Contribution

The proposed SAT-based decoupling approach allows a single algorithm to efficiently solve multiple UC variants, enhancing flexibility and generalizability in power system optimization.

Findings

Achieves better solution quality than specialized algorithms.

Demonstrates strong generalizability across UC variants.

Provides a fast, flexible framework for new UC formulations.

Abstract

As the cornerstone of modern power systems, the Unit Commitment Problem (UC) is critical for ensuring operational security and economic efficiency in the ongoing global energy transition. However, existing UC studies typically propose specialized algorithms for specific variants and operational requirements, tightly coupling the algorithms to their target models and limiting their applicability to other variants. To address this issue, this paper proposes a method that uses SAT-based reduction to decouple the algorithm from the problem, which allows a single algorithm to solve multiple UC variants. By uniformly reducing all UC variants to SAT instances solvable by standard SAT solvers, this method makes the solving algorithm independent of the original UC variant, thus granting it broad applicability across diverse variants. Experimental results show that our method achieves better solution quality than specialized algorithms and demonstrates stronger generalizability. This work offers a fast and flexible framework for addressing newly emerging UC formulations in evolving power systems.