MILP formulation for short-term scheduling of cascaded reservoirs with head effects

Short-term scheduling of cascaded hydroelectric plants is discussed in this paper. Water head effects are considered and a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation is established. The main contribution of the paper is that a systematic method is established such that the complex multivariable production functions of hydro units can be approximated by a piecewise linear function. A flexible simplex-based partition of the domain of the production function is presented. Numerical testing is performed for a test example with 3 reservoirs and 12 hydro units by using CPLEX. The results suggest that the MILP model presented in this paper is efficient and effective.