Generation scheduling methodology for thermal units using lagrangian Relaxation

This paper presents a lagrangian Relaxation based technique for solving the power system thermal unit commitment problem without time constraints (i.e. minimum-up and down time constraints are neglected). The specific technique described in this paper focuses on finding a feasible commitment and then attempting to improve on the optimality of the solution. A simplification of the possible paths to reach solution optimality is presented along with policy of updating the lagrange multipliers with minimum computational time. The feasibility of the method is demonstrated for 4-unit, 5-unit and 10-unit systems.