Quadratic approximate dynamic programming for scheduling water resources: a case study

Abstract: We address the problem of scheduling water resources in a power system via approximate dynamic programming.To this goal, we model a finite horizon economic dispatch problemwith convex stage cost and affine dynamics, and consider aquadratic approximation of the value functions. Evaluating theachieved policy entails solving a quadratic program at each timestep, while value function fitting can be cast as a semidefiniteprogram. We test our proposed algorithm on a simplified versionof the Uruguayan power system, achieving a four percent costreduction with respect to the myopic policy