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Hydro-thermal-wind generation scheduling (HTWGS) with economic and environmental factors is a multi-objective complex nonlinear power system optimization problem with many equality and inequality constraints. The objective of the problem is to generate an hour-by-hour optimum schedule of hydro-thermal-wind power plants to attain the least emission of pollutants from thermal plants and a reduced generation cost of thermal and wind plants for a 24-h period, satisfying the system constraints. The paper presents a detailed framework of the HTWGS problem and proposes a modified particle swarm optimization (MPSO) algorithm for evolving a solution. The competency of selected heuristic algorithms, representing different heuristic groups, viz. the binary coded genetic algorithm (BCGA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), improved harmony search (IHS), and JAYA algorithm, for searching for an optimal solution to HTWGS considering economic and environmental factors was investigated in a trial system consisting of a multi-stream cascaded system with four reservoirs, three thermal plants, and two wind plants. Appropriate mathematical models were used for representing the water discharge, generation cost, and pollutant emission of respective power plants incorporated in the system. Statistical analysis was performed to check the consistency and reliability of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results indicated that the proposed MPSO algorithm provided a better solution to the problem of HTWGS, with a reduced generation cost and the least emission, when compared with the other heuristic algorithms considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]