Heuristic solutions to the long‐term unit commitment problem with cogeneration plants

We consider a long‐term version of the unit commitment problem that spans over one year divided into hourly time intervals. It includes constraints on electricity and heating production as well as on biomass consumption. The problem is of interest for scenario analysis in long‐term strategic planning. We model the problem as a large mixed integer programming problem. Two solutions to this problem are of interest but computationally intractable: the optimal solution and the solution derived by market simulation. To achieve good and fast approximations to these two solutions, we design heuristic algorithms, including mixed integer programming heuristics, construction heuristics and local search procedures. Two setups are the best: a relax and fix mixed integer programming approach with an objective function reformulation and a combination of a dispatching heuristic with stochastic local search. The work is developed in the context of the Danish electricity market and the computational analysis is carried out on real‐life data.