Abstract: Hydropower station operation is based on an dispatching chart. Most of the existing studies, however, are focused on the dispatching charts for a single reservoir or single cascade of reservoirs, rather than multi-cascades. This paper decribes an approach to design a combined dispatching chart for joint scheduling of all the hydropower stations in a whole basin, by combining the single-reservoir dispatching charts of all the reservoirs in its sub-basins and taking the leading reservoirs in the upper reaches of each sub-basin or sub-cascade as the main control objective. As a case study, we have considered four leading reservoirs and three sub-basins: Ertan reservoir on the Yalong River, Xiluodu reservoir and Xiangjiaba reservoir on the Jinsha River, and Three Gorges reservoir on the Yangtze River. This approach adopts a method of power output allocation and an adaptive discrete differential progressive optimality algorithm to optimize the combined dispatching chart and maximize the generating capacity of each sub-cascade and the total capacity of the whole basin hydropower system separately, by means of numerical simulations based on the historical runoff records. Its application to the system of the above three sub-basins along with the four leading reservoirs indicates that the combined dispatching chart significantly improves the power generation benefit of this hydropower system while guaranteeing the power output of each sub-cascade.