Library

Description: The classical Unit Commitment Problem (UC) consists in determining the production of a set of thermal and hydro power generation units over a given time horizon, in order to meet a forecast energy demand and minimize a cost function. In the last years, in connection with the UC, increasingly attention has been given to active switching, namely the possibility of changing the topology of the transmission network by tripping some of the lines. Active switching has been indeed recognized as an important way to improve capacity and reliability of the network. Modifying the network topology is also very useful in modern electricity systems, where the penetration of on-programmable renewable energy sources is high and tends to be very concentrated in some zones of the network. As a consequence, the interest for automatic and optimized switching procedures is currently spreading. In this paper, we address the UC when complemented by active switching, thus leading to so-called Unit Commitment with Optimal Transmission Switching (UCOTS). We formulate the UCOTS as a mixed integer linear program, where we unify tight formulations recently proposed in literature for relevant subfamilies of constraints of the problem. Concerning the cost function, in our formulation we approximate the quadratic thermal cost objective function by a piecewise linear function based on perspective cuts and we propose a new simple and effective way to perturb it, with the aim of breaking symmetries induced by optimal transmission switching decision variables. Our original solution approach also exploits specialized branching priorities. Computational experiments on realistic UCOTS instances highlight that our new framework is able to find optimal and near-optimal solutions in reasonable amount of time by direct use of a state-of-the-art commercial MIP solver.