Short-term hydro generation scheduling of Xiluodu and Xiangjiaba cascade hydropower stations using improved binary-real coded bee colony optimization algorithm

• STHGS problem is decomposed into two parallel sub-problems of UC and ELD.
• Binary coded BCO is used to solve UC sub-problem with 0–1 discrete variables.
• Real coded BCO is used to solve ELD sub-problem with continuous variables.
• Some heuristic repairing strategies are designed to handle various constraints.
• The STHGS of Xiluodu and Xiangjiaba cascade stations is solved by IB-RBCO.

Short-term hydro generation scheduling (STHGS) of cascade hydropower stations is a typical nonlinear mixed integer optimization problem to minimize the total water consumption while simultaneously meeting the grid requirements and other hydraulic and electrical constraints. In this paper, STHGS problem is decomposed into two parallel sub-problems of unit commitment (UC) and economic load dispatch (ELD), and the methodology of improved binary-real coded bee colony optimization (IB-RBCO) algorithm is proposed to solve them. Firstly, the improved binary coded BCO is used to solve the UC sub-problem with 0–1 discrete variables, and the heuristic repairing strategy for unit state constrains is applied to generate the feasible unit commitment schedule. Then, the improved real coded BCO is used to solve the ELD sub-problem with continuous variables, and an effective method is introduced to handle various unit operation constraints. Especially, the new updating strategy of DE/best/2/bin method with dynamic parameter control mechanism is applied to real coded BCO to improve the search ability of IB-RBCO. Finally, to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed IB-RBCO method, it is applied to solve the STHGS problem of Xiluodu and Xiangjiaba cascaded hydropower stations, and the simulating results are compared with other intelligence algorithms. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed IB-RBCO method can get higher-quality solutions with less water consumption and shorter calculating time when facing the complex STHGS problem.