Efficient Unit Commitment - A modified branch-and-bound approach

Solving of the Unit Commitment (UC) problem was always and stays essential for power generating companies. With an increasing number of units in a generating company the solution of the UC problem becomes more and more complicated and time-consuming. Usually UC problems were solved for the day-, week-, month-ahead but nowadays due to the participation in the electricity market and the increased variability of electricity consumption and production shorter time intervals are favorable. The UC problem is typically stated as a binary problem where the state of each power generating unit can be either on or off. However, frequently power units refer to several types according to the generators power rating. In this case the UC problem can be reformulated into a group based UC problem. In this paper a modified branch-and-bound algorithm will be presented, which allows to find the global optimum under mild conditions fast.