Thesis - Evaluation of a Hydro Power System Production Planning Model
Job Overview
About the thesis
Vattenfall R&D is responsible for conducting business driven technical development that creates value for the company and helps us realize Vattenfall’s strategy. We develop cost effective, safe and sustainable solutions to improve the infrastructure of Vattenfall assets including Hydro, Wind, Nuclear, SKB, Heat, and Distribution
Production Planning Optimization Models for hydropower systems have a profound usage at Vattenfall in the operational planning of the assets and as a support tool in e.g. outage planning, investment studies and environmental studies. For this both commercial tools and in-house developed tools are utilized. The in-house tools are under constant development based on needs in different studies and the inspiration for this development sometimes come from the research community.
This master thesis work will assess a published hydropower optimization model [1] and compare it with the in-house model at Vattenfall R&D. This will involve preparation of the required input data, setting up a suitable set of test cases, execute the cases and evaluate the result. Since part of the input consist of relations not presently available, also estimation of these relations from different data sets will be part of the work. In addition, testing the sensitivity to different input parameters will be part of the scope.
An implementation of the published model is available online via GitHub and is written in the Julia language. The software developed for the assessment during the thesis work may also be written in Julia. However, the in-house model is written in Matlab so another option is to implement the published model in this environment. The best alternative will be decided early in the project based on initial findings during the project start-up.
[1] H. Ek Fälth, N. Mattsson, L. Reichenberg, F. Hedenus. Trade-offs between aggregated and turbine-level representations of hydropower in optimization models. Renew Sustain Energy Rev 2023; 183:113406 (2024).
- The goal of the thesis project is to assess the benefits of some features of the published hydropower optimization model not yet present in the in-house model.
- This assignment is for 1 student