Short Range Fixed Head Hydro Thermal Scheduling Using PSO

Abstract

Operation of a system having both hydro and thermal plants is quit more complex. As hydro-power plants have negligible operating cost, but hydro-power plant have higher capital cost in comparison to thermal-power plant and is required to operate under constraints of water available for hydro generation in a given period of time. Whereas the capital cost of thermal-power plant is less than the hydro-power plant, but its operating cost is high than the hydro-power plant as water is used as fuel in hydro-power plant and which is free of cost in comparison to fuel (coal) used in thermal-power plant. The problem of minimizing the operating cost of a hydrothermal system can be viewed as one of minimizing the fuel cost of thermal-power plants and under the constraints of water availability (storage and inflow) for hydro-generation over a given period of operation. Earlier, a wide variety of optimization techniques have been applied to solving the hydrothermal scheduling problems. Particle swarm optimization method is applied to solve short range hydrothermal scheduling. PSO is a stochastic random search technique that helps to avoid local minimum operating point, so best solution can be achieved with fulfillment of all the constraints.