A Variable Reduction Method for Large-Scale Unit Commitment

Efficient solution methods for large-scale unit commitment (UC) problems have long been an important research topic and a challenge, especially in market clearing computation. For large-scale UC, the Lagrangian relaxation methods (LR) and the mixed integer programming methods (MIP) are most widely adopted. However, LR usually suffers from slow convergence; and the computational burden of MIP is heavy when the binary variable number is large. In this paper, a variable reduction method is proposed. First, the time-coupled constraints in the original UC problem are relaxed, and many single-period UC problems (s-UC) are obtained. Second, LR is used to solve the s-UCs. Different from traditional LR with iterative subgradient method, the optimal multipliers and the approximate UC solutions of the s-UCs are obtained by solving linear programs. Third, a criterion for choosing and fixing the UC variables in the UC problem is established; hence, the number of binary variables is reduced. Finally, the UC with reduced binary variables is solved to obtain the final UC solution. The proposed method is tested on the IEEE 118-bus system and a 6484-bus system. The results show the method is very efficient and effective.