The Min-up/min-down Unit Commitment Problem (MUCP) is to find a minimum-cost production plan on a discrete time horizon for a set of fossil-fuel units for electricity production. At each time period, the total production has to meet a forecasted demand. Each unit must satisfy minimum up-time and down-time constraints besides featuring production and start-up costs. A full polyhedral characterization of the MUCP with only one production unit is provided by Rajan and Takriti. In this article, we analyze polyhedral aspects of the MUCP with n production units. We first translate the classical extended cover inequalities of the knapsack polytope to obtain the so-called up-set inequalities for the MUCP polytope. We introduce the interval up-set inequalities as a new class of valid inequalities, which generalizes both up-set inequalities and minimum up-time inequalities. We provide a characterization of the cases when interval up-set inequalities are valid and not dominated by other inequalities. We devise an efficient Branch & Cut algorithm, using up-set and interval up-set inequalities.
Citation
Sorbonne Universités, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, LIP6 CNRS UMR 7606, 4 Place Jussieu, 75005 Paris; EDF R&D, 7 Boulevard Gaspard Monge, 91120 Palaiseau, France November, 2016