Cost/environmentally compromised dispatch for cascaded hydrothermal system using artificial bee colony algorithm

Abstract

This paper evaluates the robustness of the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm while allocating optimal power generation in a hydrothermal power system at the level of minimum fuel cost and minimum pollutant emission impacts on the environment subjected to physical and technical constraints. The hydrothermal scheduling (HTS) is devised in a bi‐objective framework so as to optimize both objectives of fuel cost and emission release, individually and simultaneously subjected to a verity of intricate equality and inequality constraints. Initially, all feasible solutions are obtained through random search, and then the ABC algorithm is used for the exploration and exploitation processes together in the search space, thereby discovering the optimal hourly schedule of power generation in the hydrothermal system. Meanwhile, a dependent hydro‐discharge computation handles the equality constraints; especially, the reservoir end volume and slack thermal generating unit for each sub‐interval handle the power balance equality constraint. The performance of the proposed approach is illustrated on a multi‐chain interconnected hydrothermal power system with due consideration of the water transport delay between connected reservoirs and transmission loss of system load. The results obtained from the proposed technique are compared with those of other techniques. The results demonstrate that the ABC algorithm is feasible and efficient for solving the HTS problem. © 2015 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.