A New Fast Deterministic Economic Dispatch Method and Statistical Performance Evaluation for the Cascaded Short-Term Hydrothermal Scheduling Problem

The Cascaded Short-Term Hydrothermal Scheduling (CSTHTS) problem is a highly non-linear, multi-modal, non-convex, and NP-hard optimization problem that has been solved by conventional and metaheuristic algorithms in the past. As the CSTHTS problem falls under the category of applied operational research, therefore, the work is still on-going to find new algorithms and variants of the existing algorithms that would better approximate the optimal global solution in a shorter computational time. This article proposes a novel deterministic thermal economic dispatch method embedded with the improved Accelerated Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO) algorithm to infinitesimally reduce the Big O time complexity for the standard benchmark test case of the CSTHTS optimization problem. Then, it discusses and presents the importance of performing standard statistical tests to establish the supremacy of one metaheuristic algorithm over the other one in solving the CSTHTS problem. The results obtained are better than the results of the many state-of-the-art algorithms applied to solve the considered test case of the CSTHTS problem in the literature, and the superiority of the improved APSO algorithm has been established statistically using the parametric independent samples t-test and the non-parametric Mann–Whitney U-test over the other metaheuristic algorithms such as particle swarm optimization in solving the chosen test case of the CSTHTS problem