Unit commitment of single hydroelectric plant

In this paper, a model for solving the unit commitment problem of hydroelectric generating units is proposed. This problem results from a more general operating optimization scheme based on decomposition techniques. The developed model uses a target of water amount to be discharged by each hydro plant of the power system. Considering the nonlinearity of the production function of the generating units and the presence of forbidden operative zones, the methodology proposed in this paper defines the optimal commitment of these units. The problem studied can be classified as a nonlinear integer-mixed problem, for which a suitable algorithm based on Branch and Bound and Projected Gradient methods is proposed for its solution.