Electrical Power and Energy Systems 29 (2007) 2127 www.elsevier.

com/locate/ijepes

A 4-state unit denition for the unit commitment problem

Boris J. Pavez-Lazo
b

a,*

, Claudio A. Roa-Sepulveda

a Department of Electrical Engineering, University of La Frontera, Casilla 54-D, Temuco, Chile n, Casilla 160-C, Concepcio n, Chile Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Concepcio

Received 28 August 2004; received in revised form 16 December 2004; accepted 23 March 2006

Abstract This paper proposes a new state denition for the thermal generator units. Being dierent from the classic On/O state denition, a model that considers four possible states in order to commit a unit is proposed. The main dierence in the classic UC is that in the onstate mode, the unit can be committed to a maximum or minimum power according to its technical generation limits, but it can be also committed without giving power to the system in synchronism (banking state). Therefore, the unit commitment problem is formulated as a combinatorial optimisation problem with four variables. A more complete and necessary state denition is considered according to the electric energy non-regulated markets characteristics and particularly because of the Chilean energy markets characteristics. The new UC problem formulation is then solved using the Simulated Annealing technique and several examples show the eectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Unit commitment; On/O, 4-state; Simulated Annealing

1. Introduction In the appropriate planning and operation of a modern Electric Power System (EPS) is absolutely important to satisfy the demand according to the new market scenarios while maintaining system security. No matter if the EPS has being privatised or not, it is featured by a great diversity of generators, turbines and boilers and each new unit added to a system has got a better performance than the previous ones. These facts turn the EPS operation into a dicult problem to solve due to its high complexity and non-linearity thus requiring much more advanced techniques to get a better solution. If the old paradigm in power systems was the full utilisation of electric energy to a minimum cost; nowadays, this paradigm has changed to a full utilisation of electric energy to a minimum cost for the user and a maximum prot for investors.

Corresponding author. Tel.: +56 45 325537; fax: +56 45 325550. E-mail address: bpavez@ufro.cl (B.J. Pavez-Lazo).

The UC problem has been dened using models ranging from the generalised ones [16, good review] to those considering some of the market scenarios [79]. Although all the proposed models try to be general, the number of possible states of each unit remains low (mainly on or o), especially for thermal power plants (the handling of hydropower unit is easier for this case). Nonetheless, electric markets designed through POOL criteria (where the power suppliers are exposed to competition of electric power sales and have to aim at an economic operation to obtain maximum prots) need a more complete unit denition, for thermal power plants, in order to model them closer to actual operational procedures. When the power system model has been set, its solution has mainly been approached through classical techniques based on methods such as Lagrangian Relaxation (LR), Linear Programming and Dynamic Programming [10]. The most common used classical technique has been the Lagrangian Relaxation approach [1115]. Since the electric market needs to have auditable solutions, the LR technique provides a sound mathematical background to support this need. However, convergence problems could arise using

0142-0615/$ - see front matter 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijepes.2006.03.021

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B.J. Pavez-Lazo, C.A. Roa-Sepulveda / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 29 (2007) 2127

Nomenclature H h N n h Ch n P n h CSUn CSDn TSUin TSDin period under study 1, 2, . . . , H number of units 1, 2 . . . , N cost of unit n in hour h unit n start-up cost unit n shutdown cost overall running time of unit n overall shutdown time of unit n minimum up time of unit n SUn SDn minimum down time of unit n x0n, x1n, x2n generation cost function coecients b1n, b2n, b3n start cost function coecients FC fuel cost F overall costs tn time unit n has been o Rh spinning reserve in hour h Dh demand of hour h

this approach, since the unit state denition produces an integer-variable problem that is hard to handle via LR. Stochastic techniques such as Montecarlo [16] have been also used to solve the UC problem, but the unit state definition induces a dimensionality problem. Even with the big advances to modify the above techniques to improve convergence, there is still the problem of the limited number of unit state denitions, which could meet the needs of this new market scenario. Furthermore, the inclusion of restrictions such as power ow, up/down minimum times and start-up/shut-down costs has prompted the need of new solution methods that accept more rened UC models. It is particularly accepted that UC is a combinatorial feature problem where the size of the search space depends on the number of time slot in the study, on the denable state number for the dierent generating units and on the number of generating units. The size of the solution set is a restriction to be considered for obtaining good results due to the high computing cost. Therefore, the search of new optimisation techniques becomes important and it has been centred in the use of Articial Intelligence (AI) based methods. Most of the AI work reported in the literature is related to Genetic Algorithm (GA), Hopeld Neural Networks (HNN) and Taboo Search (TS) techniques. The most reported area is GA [1727] that provides good results using an On/O unit state model (GA binary coding) and simplied start/down time. Work needs still to be done to overcome the problem of considering a large number of states (GA decimal coding) and a proper denition of start/down times. HNN [2830] provides a solution that relies on a Lyapunov type of energy function for assuring convergence. However, the use of discrete variable (Unit State) provokes HNN convergence instability. Although TS [31,32] provides a good solution for not being trapped into local minima, the handling of the taboo list is cumbersome in systems with a large solution universe. In view of the above characteristics and considering the current requirements of electric markets, this paper proposes a 4-state generating unit denition for the UC formulation. This is dierent from the standard On/O model normally used, to the knowledge of the authors, in the

literature with the exception of [33,34], which describe the technical minimum state. The 4-state generating unit denition produces a dimensionality problem that is tackled through the Simulated Annealing (SA) technique as the optimisation algorithm. This is a technique that has shown advantages in many works with respect to classical optimisation techniques [3537,39]. Finally, in order to validate the model a 24-h unit commitment for a 5-unit real power system is obtained and compared to both the results provided by an analytical solution and those from the classical On/O unit model. To evaluate the robustness and the scalability of the algorithm we articially generated test systems of larger size from the 5-unit example. 2. Unit commitment general formulation 2.1. Objective function The mathematical model used as an objective function to obtain the unit commitment of thermal units is H X N X h h F P ; t C n P n CSUh 1 n CSDn
h1 n1

Production cost: This term, (2), represents the n unit costs in hour h as a function of the generated power.
h h h Ch 2 n P n x2n P n x1n P n x0n Start-up cost: This cost is dependent of both the time and the unit state when is needed. & when banking b1n t F C b2n CSUh 3 n b 3 n t b1n 1 e F C b2n when cooling Shut-down cost: The CSD values are generally considered constant.
2

2.2. System constraints System power balance:

N X n1 h Ph n D

B.J. Pavez-Lazo, C.A. Roa-Sepulveda / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 29 (2007) 2127

23

Demand and spinning reserve: The power supplied by all on-units must at least full the demand plus the spinning reserve.
N X n1 h h Ph n P D R

2.3. Unit constraints Minimum up and down times: The total number of hours for which unit n has been running must be bigger or equal to the minimum unit uptime. X TSUin P SUn 6
i

Similarly, the total number of hours for which unit n has been down must be bigger or equal to the minimum unit downtime. X TSDin P SDn 7
i

demand periods due to larger up/down times. In order to avoid a lack or excess of generation because of units disconnection or connection, it is always important to maintain units in an on state those having the higher up/down times. This makes necessary to maintain slow-acting units operative. This situation could worsen systems security. (d) The start cost. Given the thermal systems characteristics, it is always cheaper to start a generator unit when the thermal systems are still in an operational temperature. During the planning period, it may happen that it is decided to turn o a unit that is going to be needed again and this point will have a cold start cost. One way of getting economical solutions is to avoid a cold start by starting such unit at an earlier time. This criterion does not allow cheaper unit scheduling.

3.2. 4-State model In the On/O model, the UC problem is formulated as a combinatorial optimisation problem with variables 0 and 1 representing the On/O states. Considering the above, the 4-state model must be formulated as an optimisation problem using the variables 0, 1, 2 and 3 which represent the o, banking, minimum and maximum states (Table 1). In the 4-state model, the banking, minimum and maximum statuses consider that the unit is operative. Therefore, in any of these three statuses, an up time is considered. 3.3. 4-State model justication The strong competition between Independent Power Producers (IPP) to be committed in Chilean Northern Interconnected System (SING) electric market has prompted the need for a more elaborated model of the Thermal UC. Therefore, two states have been included: minimum and banking. The banking state was necessary because there are two equal Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) units with dierent owners having the same penalty factors. For the sake of clarity, banking means that the unit is not synchronised but it has all its thermal properties ready to start producing power. The banking cost is associated to the cost of keeping the thermal unit boiler at a temperature such that this can be committed at any moment.
Table 1 Combinatorial variables denitions Model On/O 4-State Variables 0 1 0 1 2 3 Unit status O (Pg = 0) On (Pg = Pmax) O (Pg = 0) Banking (Pg = 0) Minimum (Pg = Pmin) Maximum (Pg = Pmax)

Generator technical limits: Ph n;min 6 Ph n 6 Ph n;max 8

Unit initial status: The initial status at the start of the scheduling period must be taken into account. 3. The 4-state model 3.1. Background It is known that the UC is the problem with the most dicult solution that can be found in power system studies for its highly non-linear combinatorial characteristic and imposed restrictions. Basically, the UC searches from the total of available units of the generating system, the combination of those units that can satisfy the need for energy at minimum cost. In order to reach this gold without considering the solution method used, some common criteria related to the On/O states denition can be summarised as follow: (a) The use of priorities, as a function of cost, where the most economic units are chosen to have a high priority to be selected to satisfy the demand. Sadly, the cost calculation is made at maximum power, which diminishes the selection of a cheaper unit. (b) The use of priorities according to the maximum power. This is related to the denition of Base Units to satisfy the demand. This means that its more important the highest power units in order to remain in an on state during the whole planning period. This criterion is not as economical as required when bigger and more expensive power units are required. (c) The use of priorities according to the minimum up/ down times. The restrictions given by Eqs. (6) and (7) are an important problem during peak or valley

24 Table 2 Priority List, 5-unit system Unit 3 1 2 5 4

B.J. Pavez-Lazo, C.A. Roa-Sepulveda / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 29 (2007) 2127 Table 5 Operating cost ($) Pmax [MW] 50 100 300 275 450 On/O model Best 216284.8 Worst 216419.9 Average 216355.1 4-State model Best 197700.2 Worst 200495.3 Average 198775.5

[$/MW] 5.2 8.87 9.53 12.91 13.09

In order to show the advantages of the proposed 4-state denition, the results for the 5-unit system are shown. For the sake of a proper economical decision, an hourly ELD based on the classical lambda-iteration method is only performed for the UC optimal solution for both On/O and 4state models. Table 2 shows the Priority List (PL) from a lesser to a bigger generation unit cost calculated according to the maximum power output. According to these results, the UC and the Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) calculation using the On/O model are done for a load of 705 MW and 750 MW as shown in Tables 3 and 4 for hour 1 and 8, respectively. Table 3 also shows the analytical solution (optimum solution which is obtained in a manual manner reviewing the 1023 possible combinations) of the UC and the ELD by means of the 4-state generator model.
Table 3 Comparison between On/O and 4-state models Unit Initial PL solution On/O Initial Analytic solution conditions model conditions 4-state model UC ELD UC ELD

Table 3 shows that the most economical solution (both UC and ELD) corresponds to the one obtained via the 4state model. This is achieved because it is possible to consider units 1 and 4 at minimum generation level. Table 4 shows a dierent situation. At this time, the 4state model induces to the decision of leaving unit 5 in banking and unit 1 and 3 in o state. Units 2 and 4 generate 750 MW that exactly matches the demand thus giving an UC cost lower than the UC cost using the On/O model. However, when the ELD solution is considered, the total production cost highlights the On/O model because it gives more alternatives to full the demand. Table 5 shows the overall 24-h solution of the UC for both models. From these results, it can be concluded that it is always possible to obtain a lower overall generating cost by using the 4-state model. Even though the On/O model could provide a more economical solution for a particular hour. 4. The Simulated Annealing The Simulated Annealing (SA) technique was proposed by Kirkpatrick, Gelatt and Vecchi in 1983 [38] as a new technique to obtain near-to-optimum solutions to optimisation problems. SA has been tested in several optimisation problems showing great ability for not being trapped in local minima. The SA strategy starts with a high temperature giving a high probability to accept non-improving movements. The temperature and probability levels diminish as long as the algorithm advances to the optimal solution. In this way, a diversication procedure in the search algorithm is performed with care in the system energy. The main key to obtain good solutions in the usage of SA is the cooling criterion. Questions such as what should the initial temperature be? And what should the cooling procedure be? are of paramount importance for the good use of SA. There are several works in literature to answer those questions, but in general SA gives acceptable solutions when the initial temperature is highly associated to a slow cooling procedure. The most important SA parameters required to solve any optimisation problem are the following: The number of iterations at a constant temperature (Mo). A low number of Mo will result in being trapped in local minimum. Cooling strategy (qo). If the annealing temperature is decreased too fast, the algorithm will be trapped in local minimum regardless of the proper T and Mo tuning.

Pi [MW] Pi [MW] 3 1 2 5 4 3 2 1 3 5 50 100 300 0 450 900 9896.3 50 100 297.69 0 257.31 705 6927.8 3 2 1 3 5

Pi [MW] Pi [MW] 0 25 300 275 112.5 712.5 8119.8 0 89 259.92 137.38 218.69 705 6905.0

Total [MW] Total cost [$] Hour 1.

Table 4 Comparison between On/O and 4-state models Unit Initial PL solution On/O Initial Analytic solution conditions model conditions 4-state model UC ELD UC ELD

Pi [MW] Pi [MW] 3 1 2 5 4 7 7 8 10 12 50 100 300 0 450 900 9896.3 50 100 300 0 300 750 7521.9 3 1 8 7 12

Pi [MW] Pi [MW] 0 0 300 0 450 750 9106.3 0 0 300 0 450 750 9106.3

Total [MW] Total cost [$] Hour 8.

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The above two annealing parameters should be set through sensitivity analyses. These analyses need to be done in every optimisation problem. 5. Numerical results

1500
On/Off

4-State

1000

CPU-Time (Minutes)

In order to validate the model and the proposed method, an application to the Chilean Northern Interconnected System (SING), a 5-unit system (Tables 79), is presented. Although this system seems to be small (just 5 units full the demand), its importance for the Chilean economy is high (10% GDP and 40% exports) and it feeds the copper industry that produces just about 30% of the world-wide mine copper. This fact makes the electric market in this area very competitive, thus resulting in new questions such the one address in this paper: the unit commitment with more states than the classical On/O unit model. The results obtained via the proposed method are compared to the optimal solution manually found (analytic solution) for a 24-h demand curve (out of 1023 UC combinations per hour) and the classical On/O unit model. The analytical solution is found when searching for the best UC combination that gives the smallest cost per hour (Chilean Grid Code). For all test systems, the simulation conditions and the cooling sequence for SA that we have used an initial temperature value of 100, a number of iterations at constant temperature (Mo) is set to 10 and a cooling factor (qo) to 0.90. The economic load dispatch calculation, which uses the classical lambda-iteration method, is performed only for feasible solutions. The results obtained via the proposed method are compared to the classical On/O unit model (see Table 5). For the On/O and 4-state models it consider 20 times run the algorithm. Although CPU time is not the main concern at this stage of the research, the algorithm was coded in MATLAB 5.2 in a Pentium IV 2.4 GHz. The average CPU time was 24.4 s. To evaluate the scalability of the algorithm, larger systems were generated from the 5-unit test system. For the 10-unit test system, the 5-unit test systems were duplicated and the demand was multiplied by 2. Similarly, other test systems are generated. The results obtained are shows in Table 6. In order to consider the algorithm scalability, we should notice that this model considers four states. Therefore, the
Table 6 Scalability Number of units 10 20 40 60 80 100 Worst cost 397368.1 793818.4 1588402.2 2383287.8 3177075.9 3982108.5 Best cost 396162.5 787482.6 1580246.6 2376103.8 3170540.0 3965846.1 Average cost 396759.0 789583.1 1584061.4 2379531.9 3174518.9 3971992.3 Average time (min) 0.6449 1.1943 2.5668 3.7362 5.0979 6.8668

500

0 0 10 20 30 40 50 Units 60 70 80 90 100

Fig. 1. Magnitude order of NC.

maximum number of possible combinations NC given by Eq. (9) for a period of 24 h (H) according to the units number N. NC NSN 1H 9

For example and considering the 5-unit systems, Eq. (9) gives 1.73 1072 possible combinations for a 24-h period. This value is comparable to On/O model with 10 units. Over 20 units, it is impossible to graphically show the maximum number of combinations. Therefore, Fig. 1 shows the magnitude order of combinations for On/O and 4state models. From Eq. (9) and Fig. 1, it can be deduced that the number of possible solutions grows exponentially. It could be also assumed that the computing time would grow similarly. However, Fig. 2 shows that with a 4-state model, the CPU time increases linearly with respect to the number of units. This curve allows us to demonstrate that the
7

0 10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Units

Fig. 2. CPU-time.

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B.J. Pavez-Lazo, C.A. Roa-Sepulveda / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 29 (2007) 2127 Table 8 5-Unit system cost coecient Unit Stop Cold start cost b1 b2 20.588 20.594 10.650 18.639 34.749 b3 Banking start a b Production x2 x1 x0

proposed model has a good searching engine despite the huge search space. 6. Conclusions The characteristic of the thermal units is that they can undergo gradual changes of temperature, which is translated in periods of time of several hours necessary to bring the unit on-line or o-line. In this sense, it is possible to dene more operational states. The practice for the Northern Chilean Power System (SING), an unit with spinning reserve operates at a level below its maximum power output and in some occasions the fuel specic consumption slightly increases with intermediate loading due to not being operating in its optimal eciency point. The dierence of fuel specic consumption with respect to the maximum power output is obtained by Systems Operators to calculate unit real operational costs. The denition proposed in this paper allows a thermal unit to be committed at minimum power output when the thermal systems are at operating temperature. On the other hand, the denition of the banking state incorporates a real action that power systems dispatchers make when they need that a particular generating maintain its synchronism without producing power for economical reasons. This type of actions is not considered in the On/O model. Finally, the use of the SA as an optimisation algorithm permits, without any implementation diculty, to solve the UC in its complete formulation giving excellent results and having low simulation times. With the use of SA, lineal approximations of the UC formulation are not required. Acknowledgements Boris J. Pavez-Lazo gratefully acknowledges the nancial support given by the Graduate School of University of Concepcion and by the Universidad de La Frontera via the research project DIDUFRO-INI-110305. Appendix A. Characteristics and parameters of the 5-unit system (Tables 79) The positive sign in column in initial conditions of Table 7 indicates that the unit is operative, whereas the negative sign indicates otherwise.
Table 7 5-Unit system characteristics Unit Minimum power [MW] 25.0 75.0 12.5 112.5 68.8 Maximum power [MW] 100.0 300.0 50.0 450.0 275.0 Minimum uptime [h] 6 7 2 12 8 Minimum downtime [h] 2 2 2 2 2 Initial conditions 2 1 3 5 3

1 2 3 4 5

5.4 3.2 1.7 12.0 4.8

55 65 74 76 101

0.20 8.5 25.988 0.0465 3.333 88.70 0.20 10.9 23.794 0.0138 4.437 286.00 0.18 10.8 12.350 0.0292 3.220 26.00 0.18 12.2 30.639 0.0135 5.706 589.05 0.09 8.2 39.549 0.0346 2.104 355.03

Table 9 SING demand Hour 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Demand (MW) 705 708 710 711 720 722 736 750 798 859 870 875 Hour 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Demand (MW) 876 876 875 877 874 880 880 873 871 870 800 742

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