Multi-objective unit commitment with wind penetration and emission concerns under stochastic and fuzzy uncertainties

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the ever increasing renewable penetration in power generation systems, which entails modern unit commitment problems with modelling and computation burdens. This study aims to simulate the impacts of manifold uncertainties on system operation with emission concerns. First, probability theory and fuzzy set theory are applied to jointly represent the uncertainties such as wind generation, load fluctuation and unit outage that interleaved in unit commitment problems. Second, a Value-at-Risk-based multi-objective approach is developed as a bridge of existing stochastic and robust unit commitment optimizations, which not only captures the inherent conflict between operation cost and supply reliability, but also provides easy-to-adjust robustness against worst-case scenarios. Third, a multi-objective algorithm that integrates fuzzy simulation and particle swarm optimization is developed to achieve approximate Pareto-optimal solutions. The research effectiveness is exemplified by two case studies: The comparison between test systems with and without generation uncertainty demonstrates that this study is practicable and can suggest operational insights of generation mix systems. The sensitivity analysis on Value-at-Risk proves that our method can achieve adequate tradeoff between performance optimality and robustness, thus help system operators in making informed decisions. Finally, the model and algorithm comparisons also justify the superiority of this research.