An evolution strategy for common unit commitment and economic dispatch of hydrothermal power systems

This paper reports on a new approach to solve the short-term operation-planning problem of hydrothermal power systems. It uses evolution strategies to achieve a solution of the complex mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem without any decomposition of the original planning problem. Some extensions of conventional evolution strategies were necessary to include inequality constraints and integer variables. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is able to find a solution in an acceptable computation time.