Cuckoo search algorithm for short-term hydrothermal scheduling

This paper proposes a cuckoo search algorithm (CSA) for solving short-term fixed-head hydrothermal scheduling (HTS) problem considering power losses in transmission systems and valve point loading effects in fuel cost function of thermal units. The CSA method is a new meta-heuristic algorithm inspired from the obligate brood parasitism of some cuckoo species by laying their eggs in the nests of other host birds of other species for solving optimization problems. The advantages of the CSA method are few control parameters and effective for optimization problems with complicated constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed CSA has been tested on different hydrothermal systems and the obtained test results have been compared to those from other methods in the literature. The result comparison has shown that the CSA can obtain higher quality solutions than many other methods. Therefore, the proposed CSA can be an efficient method for solving short-term fixed head hydrothermal scheduling problems.