A hydro unit commitment model using genetic algorithm

This paper presents an unit commitment model for hydroelectric power systems. The hydro unit commitment has great influence on the system's efficiency and it must be considered at the pre-dispatch level. The proposed approach determines a hydro unit startup/shutdown schedule and its corresponding power output schedule for the next day. The model formulated is a mixed optimization problem and a hybrid approach based on a Genetic Algorithms and a continuous non-linear optimization techniques. The methodology decomposes the problem in two sub-problems: the first one determines the startup/shutdown schedule using a Genetic Algorithms technique; and the second sub-problem calculates the power output of all committed hydro units selected by the Genetic Algorithms. This approach was applied to three hydroelectric systems.