Short‐term scheduling of thermal units: emission constraints and trade‐off curves

This paper provides an approach to short-term scheduling of thermal units, designed to simultaneously address the economic issue of the fuel cost incurred on the commitment of the units and the environmental consideration due to emission allowance trading. The simultaneous address of the fuel cost with the emission is modeled by a multi-objective optimization problem, which is solved by a combination of the weighted sum method with the e-constraining method. A numerical example for different values of a scaling factor is considered in order to obtain the non-dominated solutions of the trade-off curve between fuel cost and emission. Our approach presents a new parameter, ratio of change, and the corresponding gradient angle, to enable the proper selection of a compromise commitment for the units. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.