Solving the unit commitment problem by a unit decommitment method

In this paper, we present a unified decommitment method to solve the unit c ommitment problem. This method starts with a solution having all available units online at all hours in the planning horizon and determines an optimal strategy for decommitting units one at a time. We show that the proposed m ethod may be viewed as an approximate implementation of the Lagrangian rela xation approach and that the number of iterations is bounded by the number of units. Numerical tests suggest that the proposed method is a reliable, e fficient, and robust approach for solving the unit commitment problem.