Consensus based distributed algorithm for economic dispatch in power systems

In this paper, a distributed discrete-time algorithm is presented to solve the economic dispatch problem. We aim to search for the optimal power generations so that the total generation cost is minimized with the supply and demand reaching the balance. The iterative procedure is designed as gradient descent method in combination with a consensus process. Without a central unit, the generators in the power system need to work collaboratively and exchange local information according to the communication topology. Simulation studies are conducted on the IEEE 9 bus system to examine the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. From the simulation results, we can observe that the proposed algorithm shows the validity and good convergence performance to seek the optimal solution. The balance between supply and demand can be achieved with increasing the economic benefits of the power system.