Security Constrained Unit Commitment and Economic Dispatch Through Benders Decomposition: A Comparative Study

Security Constrained Unit Commitment (SCUC) is a complex optimization algorithm used for day-ahead planning in restructured electricity markets. There are many existing approaches for implementing SCUC, but this paper will focus on the ones based on General Benders Decomposition (GBD). GBD decomposes the SCUC problem into a master problem, feasibility checks and subproblems. This paper will give a comparison study of different ways how the SCUC problem can be decomposed using variations of the existing GBD framework. Our goal is to show all these possible mappings and determine properties of the algorithms in terms of solution quality and runtime scalability. IEEE test cases will be used to present behavior of the algorithms when applied to networks of different size.