What is Hydrothermal Scheduling

This chapter proposes a Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA) and a Modified Cuckoo Search Algorithm (MCSA) for solving short-term hydrothermal scheduling (ST-HTS) problem. The CSA method is a new meta-heuristic algorithm inspired from the obligate brood parasitism of some cuckoo species by laying their eggs in the nests of other host birds of other species for solving optimization problems. In the MCSA method, the eggs are first classified into two groups in which ones with low fitness function are put in top group whereas others with higher fitness function are put in abandoned group. In addition, an updated step size in the MCSA changes and tends to decrease as the iteration increases leading to near global optimal solution. The robustness and effectiveness of the CSA and MCSA are tested on several systems with different objective functions of thermal units. The results obtained by the CSA and MCSA are analyzed and compared have shown that the two methods are favorable for solving short-term hydrothermal scheduling problems.