Abstract: Aimed at a large number of cascade hydropower stations, this article aggregates all the stations into a small number of groups according to their operating management relationship, upstream/ downstream relationship, regulation performance, and joint dispatch relationship. For these cascade groups (hydropower stations), we consider the types of their cooperation under joint dispatching for the goal of maximizing their multi-year average power generation. We model their generation benefit and allocate the compensation benefits to groups and the hydropower stations within each group based on the cooperative game theory and a method of comprehensive weights assignment, achieving a corresponding benefit distribution mechanism. Application to the cascade stations shows our method effectively reduces the number of models and improves calculation efficiency through the aggregation and dimensionality reduction of the stations. More important, it can reasonably quantify and distribute the compensation benefits among the groups and among all the hydropower stations, which is of great significance for coordinating different groups and different hydropower stations and promoting their participation in cascade joint dispatching.

Key words: cascade hydropower stations, aggregation and dimensionality reduction, power generation compensation benefit distribution, cooperative game, comprehensive empowerment