An efficient scheduling method for weekly hydro-thermal unit commitment

This paper proposes a practical scheduling method of hydro-thermal unit commitment taking into account the transmission network. The proposed technique includes a multi-stage screening algorithm for processing the operation constraints and a heuristic approach to obtain a feasible solution efficiently. In the first stage, we decide an initial schedule by relaxing various operation constraints of the thermal units and hydro plants. The second stage processes the thermal unit operation constraints of the spinning reserve and minimum up and down time considering the hydro system operation. In the final stage, we screen the violation of reservoir storage constraints of hydraulically coupled plants. In each stage, an optimal DC power flow is carried out for the calculation of transmission losses. The application results for a model power system including 53 buses, 12 thermal units and 24 hydro plants of 7 rivers show the effectiveness of the proposed method.