A diploid genetic approach to short-term scheduling of hydro-thermal system

In this paper a diploid genotype based genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to solve the short-term scheduling of hydrothermal systems. The proposed genetic algorithm uses a pair of binary strings with the same length to represent a solution to the problem. The crossover operator is carried out by means of the separating and recombining technique, which is of the same effect of that of uniform crossover. The dominance mechanism in the algorithm is realized by a simple Boolean algebra calculation. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has a strong ability to maintain gene diversity in a limited population due to the diploid chromosomal structure accompanying the dominance mechanism. This ability improves the overall performance and avoids premature convergence. The model can concurrently tackle the requirements of power balance, water balance and water traveling time between cascaded power stations, which are more difficult for other approaches to manage. Several examples are used to verify the validity of the algorithm.