Comparison of different variants of Differential Evolution applied to short-term economic generation scheduling of hydrothermal systems

A few variants of Differential Evolution (DE) technique have been implemented on short-term economic generation scheduling of hydrothermal systems. The performance of these variants of DE is demonstrated on a test system comprising of hydro and thermal units. A multi-reservoir cascaded hydrothermal system with non-linear relationship between water discharge rate, power generation and net head is taken into account for system consideration. Several equality and non-equality constraints on thermal units as well as hydro units are included in the problem formulation. The performances of five most popular variants of DE are explored in this paper. The results obtained by different variants of DE technique are compared with other evolutionary methods. It is seen that all the considered variants of DE are capable of producing encouraging solutions where some are observed to perform better than the others in terms of cost or computation time.