Comparison of various solution techniques in dispatching coupled electricity‐heat system with independent thermal energy storage

Abstract

Notable benefit can be brought by combined operation of coupled electricity-heat system (CEHS) and be enhanced by introducing independent thermal energy storage (ITES). With prevalent constant-flow variable temperature (CF-VT) control strategy of heat network, explicitly formulating CEHS with ITES leads to mixed-integer non-convex programming. Although the problem can be reformulated as a mixed integer second-order cone programming (MISOCP) problem and solved by commercial solvers, improving the computation efficiency still needs more effort. Here, several alternative solution techniques, based on either reformulation or approximation methods, are studied and compared with the original MISOCP formulation. The computation efficiencies as well as on the solution accuracies of various solution techniques or a combination of them are investigated and analysed based on two constructed systems. Simulation results reveal that appropriately selecting formulations of electric and heat networks can effectively improve the performance of solving the original problem.