Treffer: Variable aggregation-based formulations for pumped storage hydro model in the day-ahead unit commitment problem

Pumped storage hydro (PSH) plants can improve the flexibility of power systems. A well-designed formulation for a PSH model is essential when incorporating the PSH units into a day-ahead unit commitment model. In the literature, the formulation of a PSH model is generally based on the individual PSH unit. This formulation is tight if there is only one PSH unit in the reservoir. However, when there are multiple units sharing the same reservoir in a PSH plant, the existing formulation may introduce some symmetric structures which degrade the efficiency of a mixed-integer programming solver significantly. In this paper, to cope with the symmetric structure in the PSH plants that have multiple units, we propose two new formulations. The first formulation considers the case in which there are multiple identical units sharing the same reservoir. The second formulation considers a general case in which the units sharing the same reservoir have the same generating and pumping efficiency. Using the new formulations, the symmetric structures in the problem can be effectively broken. Numerical results are presented to study the computational efficiency of the new formulations.