A Rigid Cuckoo Search Algorithm for Solving Short-Term Hydrothermal Scheduling Problem

The key criteria of the short-term hydrothermal scheduling (StHS) problem is to minimize the gross fuel cost for electricity production by scheduling the hydrothermal power generators considering the constraints related to power balance; the gross release of water, and storage limitations of the reservoir, and the operating limitations of the thermal generators and hydropower plants. For addressing the same problem, numerous algorithms were being used, and related studies exist in the literature; however, they possess limitations concerning the solution state and the number of iterations it takes to reach the solution state. Hence, this article proposes using an enhanced cuckoo search algorithm (CSA) called the rigid cuckoo search algorithm (RCSA), a modified version of the traditional CSA for solving the StHS problem. The proposed RCSA improves the solution state and decreases the iteration numbers related to the CSA with a modified Levy flight. Here, the movement distances are divided into multiple possible steps, which has infinite diversity. The effectiveness of RCSA has been validated by considering the hydrothermal power system. The observed results reveal the superior performance of RCSA among all other compared algorithms that recently have been used for the StHS problem. It is also observed that the RCSA approach has achieved minimum gross costs than other techniques. Thus, the proposed RCSA proves to be a highly effective and convenient approach for addressing the StHS problems