An efficient chaos embedded hybrid approach for hydro-thermal unit commitment problem

•Thermal unit commitment is considered in hydrothermal generation scheduling (SHTGS).•Two newly proposed promising optimization algorithms are combined to solving SHTGS.•The proposed method is enhanced by integrating a chaotic local search strategy.•Heuristic search strategies are applied to handle the constraints of the SHTGS.•The results verify the proposed method is feasible and efficient for handling SHTGS.

This paper establishes a model to deal with the short-term hydrothermal generation scheduling (SHTGS) problem. The problem is composed of three interconnected parts: short-term hydrothermal coordination, thermal unit commitment and economic load dispatch. An efficient hybrid method composed of chaotic backtracking search optimization algorithm and binary charged system search algorithm (CBSA–BCSS) is proposed to solve this problem. In order to analyze the effect of the chaotic map on the performance of the method, three different chaotic maps are adopted to integrate into the proposed method and the corresponding consequences are achieved. Furthermore, efficient heuristic search strategies are adopted to handle with the complicated constraints of the SHTGS system. Finally, a hydrothermal unit commitment system is utilized to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The results demonstrate the efficiency of the hybrid optimization method and the appropriation of the constraint handling strategies. The comparison of the solutions achieved by different methods shows that the proposed method has higher efficiency in terms of solving SHTGS problem.