A Novel Solution Based on Differential Evolution for Short-Term Combined Economic Emission Hydrothermal Scheduling

This paper presents a novel approach based on differential evolution for short-term combined economic emission hydrothermal scheduling, which is formulated as a bi-objective problem: 1) minimizing fuel cost and 2) minimizing emission cost. A penalty factor approach is employed to convert the bi-objective problem into a single objective one. In the proposed approach, heuristic rules are proposed to handle water dynamic balance constraints and heuristic strategies based on priority list are employed to repair active power balance constraints violations. A feasibility-based selection technique is also devised to handle the reservoir storage volumes constraints. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach are demonstrated and the test results are compared with those of other methods reported in the literature. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method can obtain better-quality solutions with higher precision than any other optimization methods. Hence, the proposed method can well be extended for solving the large-scale hydrothermal scheduling.