Short term hydrothermal scheduling for partial Sudanese national grid using particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Operation of a system having both hydro and thermal plants is more complicated than hydro plants which have negligible operating cost, but are required to operate under constraints of water available for hydro generation in a given period of time. The problem of minimizing the operating cost of a hydrothermal system can be viewed as one of minimizing the fuel cost of thermal plants under the constrains of water availability for hydro generation over a given period of operation. Earlier, a wide variety of optimization techniques have applied to solve the Hydrothermal scheduling problems such as dynamic programing, gradient search but these methods has drawbacks such as large computation time, algorithm complexity. The work done in this dissertation presents solution to short-term hydrothermal scheduling problem. The solution approach based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) which applied to a part of Sudanese national grid so that the operation cost minimized by 16.6%.