Some Practical Strategies and Methods for Large-Scale Hydropower System Operations in China

With the rapid increase of number and capacity of hydropower plants operated by single dispatching departments in China, more attention should focus on seeking more robust methods for reducing dimension curse, improving effectiveness and practicability of optimization results, and enhancing computational efficiency of large-scale complex hydropower system operations. In this paper, a general solution framework for large-scale complex hydropower system operations is presented from the real hydropower systems in China. The framework consists of intelligent strategies to reduce problem size during modeling, integrated optimization methods and search methods to vanquish dimensionality difficulties effectively and cope with complicated spatial-temporal constraints, as well as interactive interfaces to adjust optimal results. Two case studies are presented.