The Parallel Interior Point for Solving the Continuous Optimization Problem of Unit Commitment

The main objective of safe and economical operation of electric power systems is to arrange the generator set to put into operation and finally minimize the total cost while meeting certain load demand. The objective of this paper is to minimize the sum of the cost of power generation and the cost of start-up. The primal dual interior point method (PD-IPM) can effectively solve the continuous optimization problem. However the unit commitment problem is a combinatorial optimization problem of large-scale, non-convex, complex and high dimension. Therefore, by processing the problem model, we can make full use of the PD-IPM to solve the model, and design an algorithm to solve the model in parallel, so as to improve the efficiency of the calculation. Using the PD-IPM, this paper tends to explore the solution of unit commitment optimization problem with continuous relaxation.