Cutting planes for the multistage stochastic unit commitment problem (Q291049)

Unit commitment (UC) is a fundamental optimization problem in power system operations, in which a system operator determines the on/off status and the power output levels for each generator at each time unit over a given operational time horizon, such that loads are satisfied with minimum total cost. In this paper the authors study a security-constrained coal-fired stochastic unit commitment model, which they use to enhance the reliability unit commitment process for day-ahead power system operations. They first develop a deterministic equivalent formulation for the problem, which leads to a large-scale mixed-integer linear program. Then, they verify that the turn on/off inequalities provide a convex hull representation of the minimum-up/down time polytope under the stochastic setting. Also, they develop several families of strong valid inequalities mainly through lifting schemes. In particular, the authors obtain strong valid inequalities for the ramping and general load balance polytopes. Finally, branch-and-cut algorithms are developed to employ these valid inequalities as cutting planes to solve the problem. Their computational results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.