MILP based short-term centralized and decentralized scheduling of a hydro-chain on Kelkit River

• Forecasting and MILP based common pool resource management method is developed for short-term scheduling.
• The day-ahead market prices used in planning are estimated with time-series methods.
• Method is applied to the model of a hydro-chain at Kelkit River for the first time.
• Benefits of centralized approach over decentralized approach are investigated.
• Centralized approach reduces spillages and increases overall profit.

In this work a scheduling problem for three reservoirs located at the upper part of Kelkit River in the Black Sea Region of Turkey is studied. Currently these reservoirs are operated independently by two private companies and one state owned company without any coordination. Operators complain about spillages causing waste of water resources. In order to remedy this problem, we propose a coordinated short-term scheduling method regarding the water as a common pool resource shared by the operators. The proposed algorithm is based on estimation of day-ahead market prices using a time-series method and formulation of the scheduling problem as a mixed integer-linear program (MILP). In order to evaluate the benefits of coordinated operation we compare its performance with a similar approach without coordination. The results show that the profit of the overall chain can be improved and spillages can be avoided significantly as a result of such a common resource management strategy.