Fast Near-Optimal Heuristic for the Short-Term Hydro-Generation Planning Problem

Short-term hydro-generation planning can be efficiently modeled as a mixed integer linear program (MILP). Depending on the size of the system and the time horizon, the resulting MILP may be too large to be solved in reasonable time with commercial solvers. This paper presents a three-phase approach based on price decomposition that yields quickly near-optimal solutions to large-scale real-world instances. For any partition of the production system into subsystems, the first phase solves a linear program to estimate the marginal cost of electricity in each subsystem. The second phase solves local MILPs corresponding to each subsystem, and gives a solution that is almost feasible. The final phase slightly perturbs the solution to obtain a feasible solution that is proven to be near-optimal. Our method is tested on real instances corresponding to Hydro-Québec's production system.