UCBlock

A SMS++ module for modeling Unit Commitment (UC) problems in electrical power production.

The core of the module is the UCBlock class which represents the UC problem. The formulation is very flexible in that UCBlock only knows that is has a bunch of generating units, each one a concrete class deriving from the abstract base class UnitBlock; several of these are available, such as ThermalUnitBlock, NuclearUnitBlock, HydroUnitBlock, HydroSystemUnitBlock, BatteryUnitBlock, IntermittentUnitBlock and SlackUnitBlock. Also, UCBlock knows that energy must flow between generating units and consumption points through an energy network, represented by a concrete class deriving from the abstract base class NetworkBlock (unless there is no network, i.e., the "bus" case, which is handled directly by UCBlock); some of these are available, such as DCNetworkBlock for the linear DC or HVDC (or hybrid) cases, ACNetworkBlock for the AC case and ECNetworkBlock for Energy Communities having to share the energy between users and then with the external grid, with OTSNetworkBlock and DesignNetworkBlock also available. Other kinds of units and networks can easily be added, and specialised solution methods for certain units (e.g., ThermalUnitDPSolver and ThermalUnitExtDPSolver for ThermalUnitBlock, NuclearUnitExtDPSolver for NuclearUnitBlock) can be developed.

Getting started

These instructions will let you build UCBlock on your system.

Requirements

• SMS++ core library

Build and install with CMake

Configure and build the library with:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .

The library has the same configuration options of SMS++.

Optionally, install the library in the system with:

cmake --install .

Usage with CMake

After the library is built, you can use it in your CMake project with:

find_package(UCBlock)
target_link_libraries(<my_target> SMS++::UCBlock)

Running the tests with CMake

Some unit tests will be built with the library. Launch ctest from the build directory to run them. To disable them, set the option BUILD_TESTING to OFF.

Note: CMake will fetch and build it automatically.

Build and install with makefiles

Carefully hand-crafted makefiles have also been developed for those unwilling to use CMake. Makefiles build the executable in-source (in the same directory tree where the code is) as opposed to out-of-source (in the copy of the directory tree constructed in the build/ folder) and therefore it is more convenient when having to recompile often, such as when developing/debugging a new module, as opposed to the compile-and-forget usage envisioned by CMake.

Each executable using UCBlock has to include a "main makefile" of the module, which typically is either makefile-c including all necessary libraries comprised the "core SMS++" one, or makefile-s including all necessary libraries but not the "core SMS++" one (for the common case in which this is used together with other modules that already include them). One relevant case is the tester for ThermalUnitDPSolver. The makefiles in turn recursively include all the required other makefiles, hence one should only need to edit the "main makefile" for compilation type (C++ compiler and its options) and it all should be good to go. In case some of the external libraries are not at their default location, it should only be necessary to create the ../extlib/makefile-paths out of the extlib/makefile-default-paths-* for your OS * and edit the relevant bits (commenting out all the rest).

Check the SMS++ installation wiki for further details.

Data

We provide some data sets that are used, among other things, by some of the testers of the test repo. Since they are large they are not included in the repo. They are automatically downloaded by Cmake if the test repo is included, but if you are not using Cmake to build the system you need to do it by hand, via

cd data
wget https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/14857791/packages/generic/nc4/latest/nc4.tgz
tar xzvf nc4.tgz

This builds the following folders:

• data/nc4/1UC_Data, which contains instances of the single-unit thermal UC problem, ThermalUnitBlock, useful to test specialised approaches such as the ThermalUnitDPSolver for

• data/nc4/EC_Data, which contains instances of UC related to the optimal design of Energy Communities (and hence in particular containing ECNetworkBlock)

• data/nc4/UC_Data, which contains pure thermal and hydro-thermal instances produced by classical random generators and widely used in the literature

• data/nc4/plan4res-data, which contains UC instances related to optimal planning of the EU-wide energy system developed during the plan4res project

Tools

We provide some tool to generate input data for UCBlock:

• a converter from text-based formats to netCDF that can be used to produce netCDF versions of the instances produced by classical random generators

• a mathpower2netCDF, which contains a converter from instances in the Matpower format to the netCDF one of SMS++

• a Matlab-based data generator

• a converter from .yml and .csv data files used to describe UC instances corresponding to Energy Community design problems used in the EnergyCommunity.jl JuMP package

Getting help

If you need support, you want to submit bugs or propose a new feature, you can open a new issue.

Contributing

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting merge requests to us.

Authors

Current Lead Authors

• Tiziano Bacci
  Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi ed Informatica "A. Ruberti"
  Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche

• Rafael Durbano Lobato
  Dipartimento di Informatica
  Università di Pisa

• Davide Fioriti
  Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Energia, dei Sistemi, del Territorio e delle Costruzioni
  Università di Pisa

• Antonio Frangioni
  Dipartimento di Informatica
  Università di Pisa

• Donato Meoli
  Dipartimento di Informatica
  Università di Pisa

Previous Contributors

• Ali Ghezelsoflu
  Dipartimento di Informatica
  Università di Pisa

• Niccolo' Iardella
  Dipartimento di Informatica
  Università di Pisa

License

This code is provided free of charge under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3.0 - see the LICENSE file for details.

Disclaimer

The code is currently provided free of charge under an open-source license. As such, it is provided "as is", without any explicit or implicit warranty that it will properly behave or it will suit your needs. The Authors of the code cannot be considered liable, either directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss that anybody could suffer for having used it. More details about the non-warranty attached to this code are available in the license description file.