This paper analyzes the effects of start-up costs of different technologies in providing electricity power. We explicitly solve a simplified linear formulation of the dispatch problem. Transforming this primal problem, we show that dominated technologies should be used only in the case of...

The second part of the thesis focuses on a different stochastic problem of finding the optimal hedging points in a manufacturing flow control system. Our simulation-based method allows solving large scale systems that are considered very difficult to solve by current standards in the literature.