Optimized production of electric energy

Application of the methods of control theory to industrial problems demands the match of the necessary computational tools to the actual financial constraints. The development of suboptimal control algorithms allows performances that were limited in the past to installations with extensive computer facilities, as required by the theory of mathematical optimization, to be reached now by smaller ones. Advances in this domain lead naturally to a rational utilization of the modern control tools based on mini- and microcomputers. Within this framework, we present in this note a method for the optimal control of electric power plants. The philosophy of the approach is to divide the global problem into partial optimization problems, whose successive solutions give the best working point for the turbinegenerator units in a computationally feasible way. Due to the limited space, only a few salient features of the method are discussed. The method has been successfully applied to the optimization of the production of two electricity companies in Switzerland.