Abstract
The paper describes the basic principles and results of a method for making detailed hydro unit schedules in a cascaded reservoir system. In this implementation, a commercial program for hydro operation scheduling is further developed to explicit account for the start/stop cost of units. Within the presented case, there is a mix of buffer and storage reservoirs and there are also several units in some plants. The multiple unit case is a special challenge due to the coupling in the unit effective head calculations.