Short-term hydrothermal scheduling using clonal selection algorithm

An efficient optimization procedure based on the clonal selection algorithm (CSA) is proposed for the solution of short-term hydrothermal scheduling problem. CSA, a new algorithm from the family of evolutionary computation, is simple, fast and a robust optimization tool for real complex hydrothermal scheduling problems. Hydrothermal scheduling involves the optimization of non-linear objective function with set of operational and physical constraints. The cascading nature of hydro-plants, water transport delay and scheduling time linkage, power balance constraints, variable hourly water discharge limits, reservoir storage limits, operation limits of thermal and hydro units, hydraulic continuity constraint and initial and final reservoir storage limits are fully taken into account. The results of the proposed approach are compared with those of gradient search (GS), simulated annealing (SA), evolutionary programming (EP), dynamic programming (DP), non-linear programming (NLP), genetic algorithm (GA), improved fast EP (IFEP), differential evolution (DE) and improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) approaches. From the numerical results, it is found that the CSA-based approach is able to provide better solution at lesser computational effort.