Abstract: This paper, based on the characteristics of the Three Gorges Cascade Hydroelectric System, establishes a new short term economic scheduling network model for a cascaded hydroelectric system that transmits power to multiregions. A method combined with linear and nonlinear minimum cost network flow algorithms is used to solve the problem of load dispatch among the cascaded plants. In this paper, the short path algorithm with the data structure which is marked to arcs of the network saves the computational time and the storage space. The result that is computed on the microprocessor IMB PC/XT with FORTRAN language programs indicates that the model and the algorithm is the paper are correct.

Key words: cascaded hydroelectric plants, economic scheduling, network flow programming, optimization method