Feasibility-Aware Security-Constrained Unit Commitment via Hybrid Soft Actor-Critic with Quantum-Sampled Features

Abstract

Security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) couples binary commitment, economic dispatch, reserves, and network security over a multiperiod horizon, making an exact solution computationally expensive for realistic system sizes. This paper proposes a three-layer hybrid framework in which a Bernoulli hybrid soft actor-critic (HSAC) policy proposes hourly commitments, a quantum-sampled auxiliary channel augments the state, and a native SCUC mixed-integer linear program recovers dispatch and security variables after only a limited subset of commitment binaries is enforced. The method is therefore solver-compatible rather than an end-to-end replacement for exact optimization. We formalize the SCUC-to-reinforcement-learning interface, derive the temporal coverage induced by the fixed cap, and evaluate the 14- 57- and 118-bus benchmark cases. The results show stable, low-cost recovery in the 14-bus case, where the best recovered schedule attains the full-horizon optimum; a very low screen-rejection rate in the 57-bus case; and a clear coverage bottleneck in the 118-bus case once the enforcement cap no longer spans a complete commitment period. The study, therefore, identifies the amount of useful commitment information that reaches the recovery model, under an exploratory Bernoulli actor and a small enforcement cap, as the dominant limitation that governs scalability