Large-scale unit commitment under uncertainty: an updated literature survey

The Unit Commitment problem in energy management aims at finding the optimal production schedule of a set of generation units, while meeting various system-wide constraints. It has always been a large-scale, non-convex, difficult problem, especially in view of the fact that, due to operational requirements, it has to be solved in an unreasonably small time for its size. Recently, growing renewable energy shares have strongly increased the level of uncertainty in the system, making the (ideal) Unit Commitment model a large-scale, non-convex and uncertain (stochastic, robust, chance-constrained) program. We provide a survey of the literature on methods for the Uncertain Unit Commitment problem, in all its variants. We start with a review of the main contributions on solution methods for the deterministic versions of the problem, focussing on those based on mathematical programming techniques that are more relevant for the uncertain versions of the problem. We then present and categorize the approaches to the latter, while providing entry points to the relevant literature on optimization under uncertainty. This is an updated version of the paper "Large-scale Unit Commitment under uncertainty: a literature survey" that appeared in 4OR 13(2), 115--171 (2015); this version has over 170 more citations, most of which appeared in the last three years, proving how fast the literature on uncertain Unit Commitment evolves, and therefore the interest in this subject

Optimal scheduling of a multiunit hydro power station in a short-term planning horizon

We consider here a price-taker generating company that wants to optimize the operation of a pump-storage multiunit hydro power station for a given time horizon, typically one day or one week. The problem is to determine the commitment and the power generation of the plant so as to maximize the revenue given by power selling. All the units of the plant are assumed to be fed by the same reservoir. The considered horizon is limited to a short term in order to assume that natural inflows to the reservoir and prices are known as previously forecast without taking into account the stochastic aspects of the problem