Imperialistic competition based short-term economic emission dispatch of hydrothermal power system with cascaded reservoirs

In this paper an imperialistic competition algorithm (ICA) based optimization technique is presented for solving the short-term economic emission dispatch (EED) problem in a hydrothermal system with cascaded reservoirs. Various operating constraints of the hydro system such as flow rate limit, reservoir storage volume limit, dynamic water balance, power generation limit and transportation delay between cascaded reservoirs are taken into account while for thermal units valve point effects and generation limits are considered in problem formulation. The bi-objective EED problem is converted to a single objective problem by price penalty factor approach. The proposed approach is successfully implemented on a test system comprising of three thermal units and four cascaded hydro units. A comparison of the result obtained by the proposed approach with those provided by other population based meta-heuristic techniques established proposed technique's superiority both in terms of result quality and computation time.