Application of Stochastic Optimization Techniques to the Unit Commitment Problem -- A Review

Due to the established energy production methods contribution to the climate crisis, renewable energy is to replace a substantial part of coal or nuclear plants to prevent greenhouse gases or toxic waste entering the atmosphere. This relatively quick shift in energy production, primarily pushed by increasing political and economical pressure, requires enormous effort on the part of the energy providers to balance out production fluctuations. Consequently, a lot of research is conducted in the key area of stochastic unit commitment (UC) on electrical grids and microgrids. The term unit commitment includes a large variety of optimization techniques, and in this paper we will review recent developments in this area. We start by giving an overview over different problem definitions and stochastic optimization procedures, to then assess recent contributions to this topic. We therefore compare the proposals and case studies of several papers.