This paper addresses the unit commitment (UC) in multi-period combined heat and power (CHP) production planning under the deregulated power market. In CHP plants (units), generation of heat and power follows joint characteristics, which implies that it is difficult to determine the relative cost efficiency of the plants. We introduce in this paper the DRDP-RSC algorithm. which is a dynamic regrouping based dynamic programming (DP) algorithm based on linear relaxation of the ON/OFF states of the units, sequential commitment of units in small groups. Relaxed states of the plants are used to reduce the dimension of the UC problem and dynamic regrouping is used to improve the solution quality. Numerical results based on real-life data sets show that this algorithm is efficient and optimal or near-optimal solutions with very small optimality gap are obtained. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.