The Fujian hydropower system (FHS) is one of the provincial hydropower systems with the most complicated hydraulic topology in China. This paper describes an optimization program that is required by Fujian Electric Power Company Ltd. (FEPCL) to aid the shift engineers in making decisions with the short-term hydropower scheduling such that the generation benefit can be maximal. The problem involves 27 reservoirs and is formulated as a nonlinear and discrete programming. It is a very challenging task to solve such a large-scale problem. In this paper, the Lagrangian multipliers are introduced to decompose the primal problem into a hydro subproblem and many individual plant-based subproblems, which are respectively solved by the improved simplex-like method (SLM) and the dynamic programming (DP). A numerical example is given and the derived solution is very close to the optimal one, with the distance in benefit less than 0.004%. All the data needed for the numerical example are presented in detail for further tests and studies from more experts and researchers. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.