Short-term hydrothermal scheduling through evolutionary programming technique

An efficient short-term hydrothermal scheduling algorithm based on the evolutionary programming (EP) technique is proposed. In the algorithm, the thermal generating units in the system are represented by an equivalent unit. The power balance constraints, total water discharge constraint, reservoir volume constraints and the constraints on the operation limits of the equivalent thermal and hydro units are fully taken into account. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated through an example system and the results are compared with those obtained by the classical gradient search and simulated annealing (SA) approaches. Numerical results show that the proposed EP approach provides a cheaper schedule even than the SA approach and hence, has more powerful ability to achieve the global optimum solution than the SA approach.