The objective of the long-term operating planning problem is to determine the optimum strategy for the generation of electricity, aiming toward the minimization of total operating cost over the planning period. In a competitive electricity market, with the participation of a significant number of hydroplants, such as in Brazil, precision modelling for operating planning is required so that a better use of hydraulic resources can be obtained. We present a long-term operating planning model based on an individual power plant representation. In order to support the high computational burden, a suitable parallel processing algorithm is proposed.