Scheduling of Cascaded Hydro Power System: A New Self Adaptive Inertia Weight Particle Swarm Optimization Approach

The scheduling of hydro electric system means to optimize the generation of hydro units from available water resources so as to maximize total benefits of hydro energy satisfying various constraints. This problem becomes more complex when the hydro plants are in the cascade pattern. The scheduling of cascaded hydro system should be in such way that water discharge from upstream plant can be effectively utilized at downstream plant satisfying all operational constraints. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm has successfully applied for such problems. Most of the existing improved Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms have been suffered from premature convergence. To overcome this problem, New Self Adaptive Inertia Weight Swarm Optimization (NSAIW_PSO) with special function is adopted for scheduling of hydro power plants in this paper. This approach is applied on a real operated cascaded hydroelectric system located in state Madhya Pradesh, India. The results from presented approach are critically compared with that of Linearly Decreasing Inertia Weight (LDIW_PSO) method and found to give better solution.