Abstract:
In power systems operation, a system consisting of both hydro and thermal power plants is
more complex than the scheduling operation of an all thermal generation due to a number of
constraints of water available in a given period for hydro generation. The hydro power plants
having a negligible operating cost compared to the thermal power plants; the objective of
generation scheduling approach of hydrothermal power plant is to minimize the thermal operating
cost under the constraints of water available to operate the hydro plant during a given period of
operation.
A variety of optimization techniques; conventional and artificial intelligence techniques has
been applied to solve the hydrothermal scheduling problems, however these techniques consist of
a certain drawbacks like drastic growth of computational and dimensional requirement, complex
algorithm and convergence characteristics.
The work done in this thesis named “Generation Scheduling Approach of Hydrothermal Power
Systems” (GSAHTPS) develops a solution of short term hydrothermal scheduling problems; the
solution approach is based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP). The IBM ILOG Cplex
Optimization Studio is used to build linear programming codes; the Optimization Programming
Language (OPL) in Cplex taken as modeling language for combinatorial optimization that may
simplify the optimization problems substantially is used, this OPL provides support for modeling
linear and integer programs and also provide access to state-of-the-art linear programming
algorithm.
The generating power characteristics of both hydro and thermal power plants being non-linear,
the piecewise linear approximations are used to solve this scheduling problems using IBM ILOG
Cplex Optimization Studio. Three methods for piecewise linear approximation that are one
dimension, triangle and rectangle method are developed in this thesis due to the non-linear output
power characteristics of hydro and thermal power plants. In this research we mainly focus on the
economic dispatch and unit commitment problems.
To assess the efficiency and the powerful performance of the proposed method; a typical case
study of forty six thermal power plants from the standard of IEEE118 bus system is investigated
with four additional hydropower plants connected in cascade.
The numerical results show that the solution techniques are computationally efficiency, simple
and suitable for decision support of short term hydrothermal scheduling problems.