Semi-rigorous thermal unit commitment for large scale electrical power systems

The paper describes a new method developed for solving the thermal unit commitment problem in large-scale electrical power systems semi-rigorously, by using a hybrid form of the discrete decision linear programming (DDLP) [13] and heuristic techniques. It is capable of incorporating all the operational constraints of the system and obtaining fully feasible schedules. The developed algorithm has been tested on a CDC7600 computer to solve the thermal unit commitment problem in the South-Western Region subsystem of the CEGB. Simulation results have shown that various solutions with different characteristics can be obtained for the same problem, requiring modest computer time and memory. Encouraging financial savings have also been obtained due to employing an optimisation (DDLP) technique within the method.