Practical aspects in solving the medium-term operation planning problem of hydrothermal power systems by using the progressive hedging method

The medium-term operation planning (MTOP) of hydrothermal systems aims to define generation targets that minimize the expected operation cost over the planning period, considering a set of constraints with respect to the power system and the generating units. Mathematically, this problem can be characterized as a linear, stochastic and large scale, which requires the application of suitable optimization tools. The purpose of this paper is to apply the progressive hedging (PH) method to solve the MTOP problem. For that, two critical aspects of the PH are addressed: the use of warm start and the choice of a suitable penalty parameter. In addition, this paper compares the performance of the PH to other popular methods, the full high-scale linear programming problem, also known as deterministic equivalent, and the nested decomposition, when solving similar problems. As a result we show that the PH is a competitive method to solve the MTOP problem.