A method to eliminate solution trapping in applying progressive optimality principle to short-term hydrothermal scheduling

A method is described to eliminate solution trapping for the POP (progressive-optimality-principle) based short-term hydrothermal scheduling algorithm. In a POP-based scheduling algorithm, the trapping phenomenon can severely hinder solution optimality and thus limits the algorithm´s applicability. In order to ensure path continuity, the proposed method identifies and bypasses the potential weak links, so that global optimality can be achieved progressively by successively solving a sequence of two-hour subproblems. Examples are given to illustrate the trapping phenomenon and the proposed method