@MASTERSTHESIS\{IMM2003-02543,
    author       = "G. K. Gislason",
    title        = "Unit commitment for combined heat and power production - Using Tabu search",
    year         = "2003",
    keywords     = "Unit commitment, economic dispatch, heuristic, combinatorial optimization, load dispatch, Tabu Search, combined heat and power",
    school       = "Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, {DTU}",
    address      = "Richard Petersens Plads, Building 321, {DK-}2800 Kgs. Lyngby",
    type         = "",
    note         = "Supervisor: Rene Victor Vidal",
    url          = "http://www2.compute.dtu.dk/pubdb/pubs/2543-full.html",
    abstract     = "In this project the unit commitment problem for combined heat and power production is solved using heuristic methods. Unit commitment involves the scheduling of the on/off status of units in a power production system in order to meet load demand while satisfying operational constraints. The unit commitment problem is a combinatorial optimization problem. A sub problem of unit commitment is the economic dispatch problem , which determines the load dispatch for a given schedule. In this project the {EDP} is formulated as a linear programming problem.

A complicating factor in solving the {EDP} here is that the power production system is composed of 4 different unit types were heat and power production is dependent and the number of constraints and variables is large. The solution approach used was to implement a fast heuristic method to solve the {EDP}. The heuristic was tested in comparison to an optimal solver and was found to produce near optimal solutions in all cases. Tabu Search (TS) is used to solve unit commitment problem. A method that generates random feasible solutions for {TS} was implemented. 

{TS} was then tested on various sized problems and the results compared to solutions found using branch-and-bound. Finally, the performance of {TS} is compared to the performance of Simulated Annealing implemented by a fellow student working on the same project."
}