Scheduling of hydrothermal power systems

The authors present a method for scheduling hydrothermal power systems based on the Lagrangian relaxation technique. By using Lagrange multipliers to relax system-wide demand and reserve requirements, the problem is decomposed and converted into a two-level optimization problem. Given the sets of Lagrange multipliers, a hydro unit subproblem is solved by a merit order allocation method, and a thermal unit subproblem is solved by using dynamic programming without discretizing generation levels. A subgradient algorithm is used to update the Lagrange multipliers. Numerical results based on Northeast Utilities data show that this algorithm is efficient, and near-optimal solutions are obtained. Compared with previous work where thermal units were scheduled by using the Lagrangian relaxation technique and hydro units by heuristics, the new coordinated hydro and thermal scheduling generates lower total costs and requires less computation time