Impact of Constraint Handling on the Performance of Differential Evolution for Cascaded Short-term Hydrothermal Scheduling

Cascaded short-term hydrothermal scheduling (CSTHTS) is a multimodal optimization problem having many constraints. Different observations suggest that in addition to algorithm type and parameters tunning, constraint handling for a particular problem also plays a vital role in achieving desirable and robust solutions. This article validates the above-stated hypothesis and shows improved results for the differential evolution algorithm (DE), which was previously understated, using a different constraint handling technique for the CSTHTS problem. Performance analysis using different constraint handling techniques, parametric impacts and comparison with previous work is presented in this article.