Large-Scale Unit Commitment for Cascaded Hydropower Plants with Hydraulic Coupling and Head-Sensitive Forbidden Zones: Case of the Xiluodu and Xiangjiaba Hydropower System
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 146, Issue 11
Abstract
This study presents a methodology for optimizing the unit commitment (UC) of the Xiluodu and Xiangjiaba cascaded hydropower plants that rank as the second- and third-largest hydropower plants in China. This UC problem exhibits high complexity due to the integrated consideration of hydraulic coupling between plants, head-sensitive forbidden zones, and other hydropower system nonlinearities. Hydraulic coupling is considered through a group of nonlinear tailrace level curves that are represented using binary 0–1 variables. The interval segmentation is used to determine the binary value by quickly identifying the forebay level range of the immediate downstream plant. The irregular forbidden zones are divided into several quadrangles to approximately describe the upper and lower boundaries using linear functions of the net head. The described forbidden zone boundaries are further integrated with power generation limitations to determine discontinuous safe operating zones. With the aid of polynomial approximations of other nonlinearities, the presented problem is finally formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model and addressed by an optimization method based on the branch-and-bound technique. The practical behavior of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by real-world data. Moreover, the MINLP model is compared with a commonly used mixed-integer linear programming model and shows improvements in solution accuracy and computational efficiency.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are proprietary or confidential in nature and may only be provided with restrictions (e.g., anonymized data).
Acknowledgments
The National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51579029), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. DUT19JC43), and the open research fund of Hubei Provincial Key Laboratory for Operation and Control of Cascaded Hydropower Station (2019KJX06) supported this research. The authors are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers and editors for their constructive comments.
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Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 146 • Issue 11 • November 2020
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© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Jul 10, 2019
Accepted: Jun 11, 2020
Published online: Aug 31, 2020
Published in print: Nov 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Jan 31, 2021
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