Crew constraints in Lagrangian relaxation unit commitment

Bringing a generating unit online from an offline state requires dedicated manpower for a few hours to monitor and control the plant systems. Usually the work crew at a power plant is limited and insufficient to start multiple units simultaneously. Computer simulation of the unit commitment process has traditionally excluded such constraints on maintenance crews at the plants. This paper addresses this limitation, presenting an extension to the Lagrangian relaxation algorithm that accounts for crew constraints in the resulting unit commitment solution. The technique has been implemented on a large scale power system, and results are shown using actual power system data.