Robust and effective parallel process to coordinate multi‐area economic dispatch (MAED) problems in the presence of uncertainty

Abstract

Considering the independency of areas as a challenge in multi-area economic dispatch (MAED) problems, this study presents a novel parallel process MAED to preserve independency in MAED problems and, at the same time, supply the demanded power in each area. Although distributed power networks are physically connected to each other to improve the financial and technical aspects of the operation, they have to operate with few information about other areas. In addition, utilising renewable energies, especially wind turbines, are unavoidable in the future to supply the demanded power. However, the uncertainty that arises from wind behaviour makes the MAED problems more complicated, meaning that the exact amount of output power in each time instant is not known. Hence, the authors analyse the wind and load uncertainty effect on the MAED cost function using the unscented transformation (UT) method. Moreover, the applicability of the UT method in terms of accuracy and speed is evaluated with Monte–Carlo simulation method. Finally, four different cases, both small and large, are studied to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed parallel process and UT method in MAED problems.