A decomposition approach for the fuel-constrained economic power-dispatch problem

We consider a special class of non-convex programs that are encountererd in dispatching the generating units of an electric company. The general form of these problems is {min c^T x: l^j ⩽ A^j x^j ⩽ u^j, x^j ⩾ 0, Σ^mj=1 x^ji.t = fi(yi.t), By = d, y ⩾ 0}, where c ⩾ 0, all entries in A are non-negative, and fi(yi, t) ⩾ 0. We show that one can achieve global optimality in the case of l^j = 0. For the special case in which A^j is a vector of ones, we suggest an alternative formulation in which the non-linearity is moved to the objective function. Numerical results indicate significant improvement in the number of iterations and computer time needed to solve the problem.