A generalized short-term unit commitment approach for analyzing electric power and natural gas integrated systems

•A generalized short-term unit commitment approach for multi-energy systems is proposed.•The proposal integrates a multi-period nonlinear optimal gas and AC power flows approach into the unit commitment problem.•The co-optimization approach directly determines the operation state of both the natural gas and electricity systems.•The proposed approach determines the reactive power dispatch and the amount of gas to be supplied to the thermal units. This paper proposes a generalized short-term unit commitment approach for optimizing the hourly thermal generation scheduling by considering the existing interdependence between natural gas and electricity infrastructures. This generalized approach is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem where a multi-period optimal gas and alternating current power flow model is incorporated into the thermal unit commitment problem. Contrary to all other proposals that ignore the reactive power dispatch and alternating current electricity network constraints for solving the unit commitment problem that considers the integrated electricity-natural gas system, the proposed solution approach simultaneously co-optimizes the active and reactive power scheduling and dispatch, while taking into account the set of physical and operational constraints associated with each infrastructure. This set of constraints includes reactive power generation limits, nodal voltage magnitude limits and dynamic gas flow constraints. The solution is obtained by decomposing this generalized optimization problem into two mutually connected optimization subproblems: one spatially separable related to the unit commitment problem and the other temporally separable associated with the unified co-optimization of both energy systems, which are sequentially solved until the same hourly generation dispatch in both subproblems is obtained. Hence, this solution is optimal for the unit commitment problem and the optimal gas and power flow problem. Study cases on two multi-energy systems are presented to numerically illustrate the suitability and main characteristics of the proposed approach.