Enhanced particle swarm optimization for short-term non-convex economic scheduling of hydrothermal energy systems

This paper presents an Enhanced Particle Swarm Optimization (EPSO) to solve short-term hydrothermal scheduling (STHS) problem with non-convex fuel cost function and a variety of operational constraints related to hydro and thermal units. The operators of the conventional PSO are dynamically controlled using exponential functions for better exploration and exploitation of the search space. The overall methodology efficiently regulates the velocity of particles during their flight and results in substantial improvement in the conventional PSO. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been tested for STHS of two standard test generating systems while considering several operational constraints like system power balance constraints, power generation limit constraints, reservoir storage volume limit constraints, water discharge rate limit constraints, water dynamic balance constraints, initial and end reservoir storage volume limit constraints, valve-point loading effect, etc. The application results show that the proposed EPSO method is capable to solve the hard combinatorial constraint optimization problems very efficiently.