Short-term Price-based Unit Commitment of Hydrothermal GenCos: A Pre-emptive Goal Programming Approach

The solution of single-objective unit commitment problems for generation companies participating in deregulated markets may not directly be implementable mainly because of neglecting some conflicting secondary objectives arising from policy-making at internal/external environment. Benefiting an efficient multi-objective approach to improve the applicability of price-based unit commitment solutions, a novel mixed integer linear preemptive goal programming model is developed in which several complementary objectives with lower relative importances are also incorporated. Non-linear characteristic curves of generating units are approximated by piece-wise linear ones. The experimental results inspiring by a real case demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. An important capability of the model is that it can easily and efficiently be matched with a various line of unit commitment problems.