A UNIT DECOMMITMENT METHOD IN POWER-SYSTEM SCHEDULING

This paper presents a unit decommitment method for power system schedu ling, Given a feasible unit commitment, our algorithm determines an op timal strategy for decommitting overcommitted units based on dynamic p rogramming. This method is being developed as a possible post-processi ng tool to improve the solution quality of the existing unit commitmen t algorithm used at PG&E. It can also be integrated into any other uni t commitment method or used as a complete unit commitment algorithm in itself. The decommitment method can also be used as a tool to measure the solution quality of unit commitment algorithms. The proposed meth od maintains solution feasibility at all iterations. In this paper we prove that the number of iterations required by the method to terminat e is bounded by the number of units. Numerical tests indicate that thi s decommitment method is computationally efficient and can improve sch eduling significantly. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.