Optimal operation of wind-hydrothermal systems considering certainty and uncertainty of wind

This paper proposes a High Performance Cuckoo Search Algorithm (HPCSA) for determining
suitable operation parameters of the optimal wind-hydro-thermal system scheduling
(OWHTSS) problem. The objective of the problem is to reach the lowest electricity generation cost
of thermal power plants (TPPs) and wind power plants (WPPs) while exactly meeting all constraints
of TPPs, WPPs and hydroelectric plants (HEPs). HPCSA is formed by applying improvements on
the two main techniques of original Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA) to cover CSA’ drawbacks
such as searching random solution spaces, always using two random solutions for getting a jumping
step and suffering from slow convergence. HPCSA accompany with CSA, Adaptive CSA (ACSA),
Snap-Drift CSA (SDCSA) and Water Cycle Algorithm (WCA) are run for solving four test systems
in which the largest and complicated system is comprised of four TPPs, four HEPs and two WPPs
with the uncertain wind feature. The result comparisons indicate that HPCSA is superior to applied
and previous methods, and other modified versions of CSA in the literature in terms of better cost,
higher stability, faster search ability and higher success rate. As a result, it leads to a conclusion that
HPCSA is a strong metaheuristic algorithm for solving OWHTSS problem.