Solution of Short-term Economic-Emission Hydrothermal Generation Scheduling by an Efficient Particle Swarm Optimization technique

The Short term Economic-Emission Hydrothermal Generation Scheduling problem is a bi- objective problem with two nonlinear objective functions and a set of various constraints. In this paper for handling two objectives (minimum fuel cost and minimum emission), they are combined into a single objective problem by weighted sum method. Tuning weighting factors of the weighted single objective function is done by Decision Maker (DM) deciding to receive desirable nondominant solution. To minimize the single objective function, an Efficient Particle Swarm Optimization (EPSO) technique is presented. EPSO uses a hybrid topology by combining the star topology and random topology for guiding particles during search process. Both global search ability and convergence behavior are improved in the proposed hybrid topology. The proposed EPSO is tested on a well known hydrothermal system with four cascaded reservoirs and three thermal units. Obtained result is compared with some recently published methods in the area.