Short-term hydro generation scheduling of cascade plants operating on Litani River project — Lebanon

Short-term hydro generation optimal scheduling of cascade hydropower stations is a typical nonlinear programming problem that minimizes the deviation between the produced power and the grid requirement while satisfying hydraulic and electrical constraints. In this work, the main objective is to find the optimal hourly water discharge rate of each hydro station in a multi-reservoir system to minimize the power deficit. The demanded load is then distributed among the working units of three cascade hydropower stations constructed on Litaini River - Lebanon: Markaba, Awali and Charles Helou. To achieve our goal, methods involving and joining data mining and mathematical programming will serve as a base for a Decision Support Tool (DST). Based on the DST features, a distributed control structure is implemented using a multiple software framework. MATLAB is used for mathematical optimization while LabVIEW is employed to develop Human Machine Interface (HMI) for sequential control.