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The Summed Start-up Costs in a Unit Commitment Problem

We consider the sum of the incurred start-up costs of a single unit in a Unit Commitment problem. Our major result is a correspondence between the facets of its epigraph and some binary trees for concave start-up cost functions CU, which is bijective if CU is strictly concave. We derive an exponential H-representation of this epigraph, and provide an exact linear separation algorithm. These results significantly reduce the integrality gap of the Mixed Integer formulation of a Unit Commitment Problem compared to current literature.