Genetic aided scheduling of hydraulically coupled plants in hydro-thermal coordination

Scheduling of hydraulically coupled plants (HCPs) has been reckoned as one of the most difficult parts of the problem of hydro-thermal power system coordination. This paper presents an efficient approach to the 24-hour ahead generation scheduling of HCPs based on genetic algorithms. In this paper, the difficult water balance constraints caused by hydraulic coupling are embedded and satisfied throughout the proposed encoding and decoding algorithm. The optimal schedules of both HCPs and thermal units are concurrently obtained within the evolutionary process of artificial chromosomes. Significantly, neither reservoir successive approximation nor hydro-thermal iteration is needed. The proposed approach is applied to an actual utility system of three HCPs and 22 thermal units with great success. Results show that the new approach obtains a more highly optimal solution than the, conventional dynamic programming with successive approximation (DPSA) method.