With growing concerns about energy and environment, short-term economic environmental hydrothermal scheduling (SEEHS) plays a more and more important role in power system. Because of the two objectives and various constraints, SEEHS is a complex multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP). In order to solve the problem, we propose an improved multi-objective gravitational search algorithm (IMOGSA) in this paper. In IMOGSA, the mass of the agent is redefined by multiple objectives to make it suitable for MOOP. An elite archive set is proposed to keep Pareto optimal solutions and guide evolutionary process. For balancing exploration and exploitation, a neighborhood searching mechanism is presented to cooperate with chaotic mutation. Moreover, a novel method based on feasible space is proposed to handle hydro plant constraints during SEEHS, and a violation adjustment method is adopted to handle power balance constraint. For verifying its effectiveness, the proposed IMOGSA is applied to a hydrothermal system in two different case studies. The simulation results show that IMOGSA has a competitive performance in SEEHS when compared with other established algorithms. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.