Multi-objective Optimal Multiple Reservoir Operation

Hydropower plants produce most of the electrical power generated in Brazil. Although the remaining potential is still large, most of it is located far from the industrialized southeastern states. In addition to that, the increasing opposition to the construction of new large reservoirs, for ecological and social reasons, highlights the need for the efficient operation of the existing system. In this work, a formulation recently developed by the authors, which has been shown to efficiently deal with the operational constraints of a single plant, is expanded to the multi-reservoir case. A multi-objective optimization of a system of five Brazilian hydropower plants is performed, with the objectives of increasing the mean power generation along a year and reducing the peak of demand of non-renewable energy sources. The optimization algorithm is taxed by the increase in the number of variables and by their unsual combination in the efficient solutions set, leading to problems that were found to be associated with the the simple Gaussian mutation operator employed.