Differential evolution technique-based short-term economic generation scheduling of hydrothermal systems

This paper presents differential evolution (DE)-based optimization technique for solving short-term economic generation scheduling of hydrothermal systems. A multi-reservoir cascaded hydrothermal system with non-linear relationship between water discharge rate, power generation and net head is considered here. The water transport delay between the connected reservoirs is also taken into account. Several equality and non-equality constraints on thermal units as well as hydro units and the effect of valve-point loading are also included in the problem formulation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on two test systems comprising of hydro and thermal units. Convergence characteristic of the proposed technique has been found to be quite satisfactory. The results obtained by the proposed technique are compared with other evolutionary methods. It is seen that the proposed technique is capable of producing encouraging solutions. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.