Optimal unit commitment and economic dispatch with transmission and energy constraints

Two of the primary economic problems faced by electric utility companies are known as the unit commitment and economic dispatch problems. The unit commitment problem involves determining on/off schedules for each generator over a planning horizon of up to one week at a time. Once the generator schedule has been determined via unit commitment, the generation levels are set with an economic dispatch. The unit commitment and economic dispatch problems are often solved neglecting important generator and transmission constraints. The solution must then be adjusted in an ad hoc manner. This may cause the utility to incur significant costs which could be avoided with better advance planning. We provide an algorithm which directly includes the transmission and generator constraints. Exploitation of the problem structure and careful implementation of sparse matrix methods and active set methods produce an algorithm which is computationally efficient.