Developing heuristic solution techniques for large-scale unit commitment models

Abstract: Shifting towards renewable energy sources and reducing carbon emissions necessitate sophisticated energy system planning, optimization, and extension. Energy systems optimization models (ESOMs) often form the basis for political and operational decision-making. ESOMs are frequently formulated as linear (LPs) and mixed-integer linear (MIP) problems. MIPs allow continuous and discrete decision variables. Consequently, they are substantially more expressive than LPs but also more challenging to solve. The ever-growing size and complexity of ESOMs take a toll on the computational time of state-of-the-art commercial solvers. Indeed, for large-scale ESOMs, solving the LP relaxation -- the basis of modern MIP solution algorithms -- can be very costly. These time requirements can render ESOM MIPs impractical for real-world applications. This article considers a set of large-scale decarbonization-focused unit commitment models with expansion decisions based on the REMix framework (up to 83 million variables and 900,000 discrete decision variables). For these particular instances, the solution to the LP relaxation and the MIP optimum lie close. Based on this observation, we investigate the application of relaxation-enforced neighborhood search (RENS), machine learning guided rounding, and a fix-and-propagate (FP) heuristic as a standalone solution method. Our approach generated feasible solutions 20 to 100 times faster than GUROBI, achieving comparable solution quality with primal-dual gaps as low as 1% and up to 35%. This enabled us to solve numerous scenarios without lowering the quality of our models. For some instances that GUROBI could not solve within two days, our \FP method provided feasible solutions in under one hour.