Atakan, Semih and Lulli, Guglielmo and Sen, Suvrajeet (2018) A State Transition MIP Formulation for the Unit Commitment Problem. IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 33 (1). pp. 736-748. ISSN 0885-8950
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Abstract
In this paper, we present the state-transition formulation for the unit commitment problem. This formulation uses new decision variables that capture the state transitions of the generators, instead of their on/off statuses. We show that this new approach produces a formulation which naturally includes valid inequalities, commonly used to strengthen other formulations. We demonstrate the performance of the state-transition formulation and observe that it leads to improved solution times especially in longer time-horizon instances. As an important consequence, the new formulation allows us to solve realistic instances in less than 12 minutes on an ordinary desktop PC, leading to a speed-up of a factor of almost two, in comparison to the nearest contender. Finally, we demonstrate the value of considering longer planning horizons in UC problems.