Fundamentals and recent developments in stochastic unit commitment

Optimal scheduling of power generating units must take into account possibilities of forecast errors and equipment failure. The stochastic unit commitment problem addresses scheduling of generating units under uncertainty. Focusing primarily on scenario-based approaches, this article summarizes the fundamental concepts of stochastic unit commitment, including the representation of uncertainty, different problem formulations and the most common decomposition techniques applied to solve the problem. It also provides a survey of the latest research on stochastic unit commitment, including an in-depth review of selected important recent advances in decomposition based methods.