A Method to Eliminate Solution Trapping in Applying Progressive Optimality Principle to Short-Term Hydrothermal Scheduling

A method is described to eliminate solution trapping for the POP (progressive-optimality-principle) based short-term hydrothermal scheduling algorithm. In a POP-based scheduling algorithm, the trapping phenomenon can severely hinder solution optimality and thus limits the algorithm's applicability. In order to ensure path continuity, the proposed method identifies and bypasses the potential weak links, so that global optimality can be achieved progressively by successively solving a sequence of two-hour subproblems. Examples are given to illustrate the trapping phenomenon and the proposed method. >