Alternative formulations for unit commitment

The short-term unit commitment (UC) problem in thermal power generation is a large-scale, mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, which is difficult to be solved efficiently. It is possible to approximate the non-linear objective by means of piece-wise linear functions, so that UC can be approximated by a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). This paper presents tighter constraints for the formulation to solve the thermal unit commitment (UC) problems, which is more computationally efficient. Results based on realistic studies support this conclusion.