An Evolutionary Particle Swarm Optimization, EPSO, approach to optimize the operation of hydro stations in market environment

This paper describes the application of Evolutionary Particle Swarm Optimization, EPSO, to the optimization of the short term operation of hydro stations in market environment. The maximization of the revenues of hydro stations, namely pumping stations, is gaining increasing attention by generation companies. However, this is typically a complex problem given the non linear relation between the power, the flow and the head, the temporal coupling between stations in cascade and the increasing number of pumping stations. The EPSO based algorithm displayed a very good performance in terms of the quality of the final operation plan as well as regarding the speed of convergence and the robustness of the algorithm.