Majid Poshtan - PhD Candidate and lEEE Student Member Electric Power Research Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, ۷۰۱۱۸, USA

Economic Dispatch, which includs hydro-thermal scheduling, is a desirable area for development for a number of reasons First, it is an important part of power system operation. Second, it is computationally intensive. Third, it makes use of a number of optimization algorithms which involve an interactive process. Finally it is an area of interest to power system utilities. For these reasons, this work is directed towards an application of Dynamic Programming (DP) in the area of hydro-thermal scheduling through the use of MATLABE in UNIX enviroment. Dynamic programming (DP) is mathematical technique well suited for the optimization of multistage decision problems like hydro-thermal scheduling [1]. Shoults etal used DP for quasi-static economic dispatch [2]. Gibson etal proposed a new approach for solving multistage decision problems in power system operation by using fuzzy (DP)[3].Michalland etal provided stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) for trading off hydropower and irrigation [4].Ozelkan etal applied DP in order to determine the optimal management policy for a water reservoir by modeling the phisical problem via a linear quradratic structure [5] Travers etal employed DP to minimize system variable cost and marginal costs,They characterized the boiler-turbine generators by variable operating costs and ramp tate (liner) constrains and costs [6]. The author applied DP to hydro-thermal scheduling considering the reservoir and envirometal constraints. The complete research was to develop a software program using MATLABLE which can be used in power system operation as off-line calculation. The package is called the "Optimal Power System Operation" (OPSO). It can facilitate the understanding of power system optimal operation and contains several programs including hydro-thermal scheduling. It is believed that OPSO can be employed to simplify this complicated power engineering concept [7,8,9]. OPSO is also a research tool for the preliminary study of operational schemes for researchers and engineers in industry and the utilities.