ABSTRACT:

The Synthetic Two-Plant Hydropower Balance Benchmark is a reproducible academic dataset and reference implementation for evaluating short-horizon hydropower scheduling and optimization methods. It represents a synthetic cascade of two coupled hydropower plants over a 24-hour horizon, with hourly inflows, power schedules, turbine flows, spillages, reservoir volumes, forebay and tailwater levels, hydraulic head, delivered power, deficits, penalties, and mass-balance residuals.

The benchmark provides deterministic reference cases, frozen inputs, outputs, figures, checksums, and documented assumptions to support transparent comparison of optimization approaches. Its physical reference model applies hourly water-balance conservation, delayed upstream-to-downstream propagation, synthetic storage–elevation and tailwater relationships, turbine constraints, spill management, and power conversion based on hydraulic head and turbine efficiency.

Parameters are synthetic and documented, with selected ranges informed by publicly available hydropower references. The resource contains no proprietary source code, operational time series, confidential tables, or proprietary coefficients. It is intended for research, teaching, reproducibility studies, and benchmarking of metaheuristics, including GRASP-based, together with ILS perturbation method, and VND as a neighbour search method combined to create a hybrid optimization method.