Optimization Of A Very Large Hydroelectric System By Network Flow Techniques With Additional Constraints

A method and a computing program are described in this paper for optimal daily scheduling of hydraulically cascaded power plants with dual pumping and generation operating modes, in order to supply a given diagram vs. time of the active power. The program schedules every pumping or generation plant in order to minimize water consumption and satisfy the given generation diagram, with due consideration to the actual characteristics of hydraulic machinery and to the hydraulic constraints. The chosen procedure to solve the above problem, which is one of non-linear optimization with many integer variables, resorts to a suitable piecewise linearization. After this, the continuous problem is solved with the techniques of optimization on network flow with additional constraints. Finally, the mixed integer problem is solved using Tomlin's branch and bound method.