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

Investigation of the applicability of Lyapunov exponents for transient stability assessment

Lyapunov Exponents (LEs) measure the exponential rates of divergence or convergence of nearby trajectories in state-space models. The study presented in this paper investigates the applicability of this concept to power system transient stability analysis. It is shown that the Largest Lyapunov Exponent (LLE) of the post-fault system subsequent to a given fault scenario is independent of the fault clearing time up to the Critical Clearing Time (CCT). Furthermore, the set of exponentially stable equilibrium points of the post-fault system corresponding to different load-generation combinations of the pre-fault system can also be characterized by this LLE. The study compares the LEs with the conventional Time Domain Simulation (TDS), Extended Equal Area Criterion (EEAC) and Potential Energy Boundary Surface (PEBS) methods. It is shown that LEs give reliable results. Further, the power system stability regions can be determined using the invariance of LEs within the same stability region

Algorithms for incorporating reactive power into market dispatch

This paper proposes some methods for incorporating reactive power dispatch into nodal pricing and dispatch algorithms in poolbased electricity markets. The current approach of dispatching real power using a simplified power flow model and subsequently allocating reactive power as an ancillary service has the problem of getting suboptimal and some times infeasible solutions. However the complete a.c. power flow formulation can lead to problems, due to non-convexity and resource limitations. This paper proposes an improvement to the standard decoupled linear formulation approach. In the proposed method real power is dispatched first and then reactive power is dispatched allowing small changes to real power dispatch. The results of case studies show that this method gives similar results to the full non-linear solution for real and reactive power dispatch and prices