Asynchronous Decentralized Framework for Unit Commitment in Power Systems

Optimization of power networks is a rich research area that focuses mainly on efficiently generating and distributing the right amount of power to meet demand requirements across various geographically dispersed regions. The Unit Commitment (UC) problem is one of the critical problems in power network research that involves determining the amount of power that must be produced by each generator in the power network subject to numerous operational constraints. Growth of these networks coupled with increased interconnectivity and cybersecurity measures have created a need for applying decentralized optimization paradigms. In this paper, we develop a novel asynchronous decentralized optimization framework to solve the UC problem. We demonstrate that our asynchronous approach outperforms conventional synchronous approaches, thereby promising greater gains in computational efficiency.