A Necessary and Sufficient Condition for Obtaining Feasible Solution to Hydro Power Scheduling with Multiple Operating Zones

Hydro generation scheduling with complicated discrete dynamic operating constraints and multiple operating zones is extremely difficult. One of the most important problems is to identify the feasibility of a hydro unit commitment and to construct a feasible solution efficiently. This paper focuses addressing the issues of the hydro generation scheduling problem with a single hydroelectric plant and several units and multiple operating zones. Based on analysis of the structure of water conservation equations, a necessary and sufficient condition on the problem feasibility is presented and is applied in constructing feasible solution as efficient tool. Its application for generating efficient cutting planes in mixed integer programming problem is discussed. The theoretical results are also validated by numerical examples.