Evaporation Rate-Based Water Cycle Algorithm for Short-Term Hydrothermal Scheduling

Hydrothermal scheduling is a vital step in power system operational planning. It deals with the coordinated operation of hydel and thermal machines so that the cost of production of electrical energy is minimum subject to the satisfaction of the constraints. This paper presents the solution of non-convex short-term hydrothermal scheduling due to valve point effects using an improved version of a meta-heuristic method water cycle algorithm called as evaporation rate-based water cycle algorithm (ERWCA). ERWCA is a nature inspired algorithm based on hydrologic cycle of water that how the raindrops form streams and these streams flow to the rivers and sea. The feasibility and effectiveness of ERWCA have been tested on different hydrothermal test systems consisting of four hydel units configured with one thermal, three thermal and ten thermal units involving all the constraints. The results obtained from these simulations have been compared with other methods such as DE, PSO and GA, and they show that the solutions obtained from ERWCA are superior in terms of cost and computational time. Hence, the proposed ERWCA is a remarkable method for solving short-term hydrothermal scheduling problem.