Business Case: Scheduling in Hydro-Thermal Plants

Challenge

Variations in demand for electricity coupled with start-up and production costs in thermal units and maintenance of pumping levels in hydro units can make power management a challenging task.

Solution

Dash provides a comprehensive tool, Xpress-SP, for scenario generation and management, modeling of business problems involving uncertainty, and incorporating variations in optimal decision making. This suite is further enhanced by its unique visualization and analysis components facilitating easy and rapid development of applications dealing with uncertainty.

Implementation

Demand loads are simulated using a statistical model. The properties of loads such as means and variances are used to generate a binary scenario tree. This tree is further reduced and restructured by aggregating similar scenarios.

The decision model pertaining to optimal production and pumping levels ensures meeting periodic demand, maintaining reserves at hydro units, and minimizing total expected cost.

A user interface is built on top of the decision model for visualization of dynamics of the problem in different scenarios.

Result and Analysis

The decision model is run by simulating several load distributions and generating corresponding scenarios. The results are visualized as follows:

The distributions of total cost and other entities are analyzed at the dashboard. Sensitivity with respect to load variability, available resources, and production costs are studied by running the model multiple times.

Conclusively, such analyses involving uncertainty are made in a fairy small amount of time as a result of the seamless integration of various technologies in one framework.

Benefits

Incorporate uncertainty in decision model
Concise representation
Comprehensive analysis
Flexibility and scalability