Shabbir Ahmed, Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract

Day-ahead scheduling of electricity generation or unit commitment is an important and challenging operational activity of power system operators. Mixed integer programming (MIP) has been firmly established as an effective technology for this problem for moderate scale integrated systems. In this work, we consider decentralized unit commitment in a large-scale network of generation systems. We develop a decomposition-coordination approach by which independent unit commitment MIP models can be integrated to achieve high quality solutions to the network-wide problem. The approach is based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) originally developed for decentralized convex optimization. We adapt ADMM to the highly nonconvex unit commitment problem and demonstrate its computational effectiveness.

This talk is based on joint works with Javad Feizollahi, Mitch Costley, Andy Sun and Santiago Grijalva.

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