Adela Pages : December 11, 2007

Medium-term power planning problem: model and solutions approach.

Abstract

The medium-term power planning problem can be modelled with a quadratic objective function, which represents the maximization of profits, and an exponential number of inequality load-matching constraints (LMCs) plus some other inequalities for other technical constraints. In order to avoid the computation and management of so many LMCs several methodologies has been tried: a column generation approach and a heuristic procedure. The heuristic solves a sequence of similar problems: starting from a relaxed problem with only the load-balance equation the problem is enlarged at each iteration with a reduced subset of LMCs. The solution to each problem is found by means of an Interior-point code, which uses warm starting techniques in order to accelerate the finding of the solution to the new problem. In the talk the main modelling aspects of the medium-term power planning problem will be presented and details of the implemented techniques will be outlined giving special emphasis on the warm-start procedures.