BRANCH-AND-BOUND SCHEDULING FOR THERMAL GENERATING-UNITS

Scheduling thermal generation units plays an important role in power system economic operations. Each day power generating units have to be selected to realize a reliable production of electric energy with the fewest fuel costs. This paper presents a new branch-and-bound algorithm for the unit scheduling problem. An efficient branching method based on the 'heap' data structure and a simple intuitive bounding rule are proposed. Computational results indicate that the presented approach locates the optimum schedule in less time than many existing techniques.