Projected mixed integer programming formulations for unit commitment problem

• The semi-continuous variables are eliminated from the UC formulation.
• Two tight mixed integer programming formulations of UC problem are obtained.
• The reduced problem of projected formulations has good compactness.

The thermal unit commitment (UC) problem is a large-scale mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP), which is difficult to solve efficiently, especially for large-scale instances. This paper presents a projected reformulation for UC problem. After projecting the power output of unit onto [0,1], a novel MIQP reformulation, denoted as P-MIQP, can be formed. The obtained P-MIQP is tighter than traditional MIQP formulation of UC problem. And the reduced problem of P-MIQP, which is eventually solved by solvers such as CPLEX, is compacter than that of traditional MIQP. In addition, two mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulations can be obtained from traditional MIQP and our P-MIQP of UC by replacing the quadratic terms in the objective functions with a sequence of piece-wise perspective-cuts. Projected MILP is also tighter and compacter than the traditional MILP due to the same reason of MIQP. The simulation results for realistic instances that range in size from 10 to 200 units over a scheduling period of 24 h show that the projected reformulation yields tight and compact mixed integer programming UC formulations, which are competitive with currently traditional ones.