Fast identification of inactive security constraints in SCUC problems

Security constrained unit commitment (SCUC) is one of the most important daily tasks that independent system operators (ISOs) or regional transmission organizations (RTOs) must accomplish in daily electric power market. Security constraints have long been regarded as difficult constraints for unit commitment problems. If the inactive security constraints can be identified and eliminated, the SCUC problem can be greatly simplified. In this paper, a necessary and sufficient condition for a security constraint to be inactive is established. It is proved that all inactive constraints can be identified by solving a series of small-scale mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problems. More importantly, an analytical sufficient condition is established and most of the inactive constraints can be quickly identified without solving MILP or linear programming (LP) problems. A very important feature of the conditions obtained is that they are only related to the load demands and parameters of the transmission network. Numerical testing is performed for three power grids and the results are impressive. Over 85% of the security constraints are identified as inactive and the crucial transmission lines affecting the total operating cost are among those associated with the remaining security constraints, providing useful information for transmission planning.