A Branch and Cut Search for the Deterministic Optimization of the Thermal Unit Commitment Problem. Part II: Computational Results

This paper analyzes the computational performance of the deterministic optimization approach for the Security Constrained Unit Commitment problem (SCUC) addressing thermal generating units, that was developed in its companion paper. The technique proposed in the first part is based on suitable integer cutting planes, specific for the SCUC problem, and a Branch and Bound search which incorporates the cuts and results in a particular Branch and Cut algorithm for the SCUC problem. In this paper, the performance of the proposed cuts is properly illustrated. Then, the application of the proposed Branch and Cut algorithm is exemplified with two case studies and their variants, with the aim of showing the performance of the approach for problems of different dimensions and characteristics. Comparisons with other deterministic solvers is also carried out.