A NEW UNIT COMMITMENT METHOD

This paper introduces a new unit commitment method based on a decommit tment procedure for solving the power system resource scheduling probl em. From an initial schedule of all available units committed over the study period, a 'one-at-a-time' unit decommitment is accomplished by Dynamic Programming according to some specified economic criteria. The decommittment process continues until no further reduction in total c ost is possible, or the unit schedules of two consecutive iterations o ver the time period remain unchanged without any violation of the spin ning reserve constraint. Two criteria for decommitting a unit are intr oduced and described in detail. Comparisons of the proposed unit commi tment method with the Lagrangian Relaxation (LR) approach and Fred Lee 's Sequential Unit Commitment method (SUC) demonstrate the potential b enefits of the proposed approach for power system operations planning.