One rank cuckoo search algorithm for short-term hydrothermal scheduling with reservoir constraint

In this paper, two one rank cuckoo search algorithm (ORCSA) based methods are first proposed for solving the short-term hydrothermal scheduling (ST-HTS) problem. The main objective of the ST-HTS problem is to minimize total generation fuel cost over a schedule time while satisfying equality constraints including power balance equations, total water discharge constraint and inequality constraints including reservoir storage limits and the operation limits of the hydropower plants and thermal generators. The proposed ORCSA is effective for solving optimization problems based on the improvement of the conventional cuckoo search algorithm. Two distributions including Lévy distribution and Cauchy distribution are used in the ORCSA method resulting in two versions of ORCSA including ORCSA-Lévy and ORCSA-Cauchy. Moreover, the bound by best solution mechanism is also proposed to handle inequality constraints to speed up its computational process. Test result comparison with other methods has indicated that the proposed ORCSA methods are very favorable for solving the short term hydrothermal scheduling problems with reservoir constraint.