Solving Unit Commitment Problems with Demand Responsive Loads

This paper focuses on using variations of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm for solving unit commitment problems with high volumes of demand responsive loads on the power grid. We present a formulation of the unit commitment problem with demand responsive loads. We then show through reformulation and relaxations of the problem that variations of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm can be used to determine the time series decisions for the demand responsive loads. We show through computational experiments on the IEEE Reliability Test System that the time series of demand responsive load decisions obtained through our approach are near optimal and describe how large-scale parallel implementations of our approach can be highly computationally efficient.