# Time varying constrained optimization

Dear Julia community,

This is Edgar a completely newbie in Julia that has been looking for an alternative to R and Matlab for solving optimization problems. After reading some examples available at JuliaOpt I think that is the right tool for solving my problem. However I did not fin anything relating with my specific question mentioned in the title.

Giving some context I am trying to solve the unit commitment problem . Lets denote G as the set containing generator g=1,2… and T the set containing the number of periods t=1,2… of the optimization.

My problem is that despite of having defined my objetive function (which is basically the fuel costs + the startup/shutdown costs) and the prediction of all my constrains (which basically are the power demand + the maximum available capacity depending on the weather conditions) I do not know how to implement that my lower and upper bounds of the problem (min and max capacity) are changing over the time. Basically I want to implement that:

lb_i \leq x_it \leq ub_i

Will become:

lb_it \leq x_it \leq ub_it

Has anyone tried something like that before?

Welcome Edgar! I can only offer this: Put your latex equations into $to render them. 1 Like Hi, I think JuMP might be a better tool for the Unit Commitment problem, you’re going to use binary variables and will want to define your constraints in a convenient way. Give it a try with a MILP solver like Cbc or GLPK. # add the required packages Pkg.add("JuMP") Pkg.add("Cbc") # import into working environment using JuMP using Cbc: CbcSolver # start playing  See the doc for how to express constraints better than what? He was quoting JuliaOpt, the home of JuMP. Oh that’s on me, my poor brain parsed “Optim” instead of JuliaOpt m = Model(solver = ClpSolver()) # x[i,t] @variable(m, x[1:2,1:3] >= 0) upper_bounds = [10.0 12.5 13.5;14.0 15.0 16.0] lower_bounds = [5.0 2.5 3.5; 4.0 1.0 1.0] @constraint(m, [i=1:2,t=1:3], x[i,t] >= lower_bounds[i,t]) @constraint(m, [i=1:2,t=1:3], x[i,t] <= upper_bounds[i,t])  An even simpler way is just: m = Model() @variable(m, lower_bounds[i,t] <= x[i=1:2, t=1:3] <= upper_bounds[i,t])  2 Likes Sorry Mauro! I forgot to write the$, my fault