A reliable deterministic method for multi-area economic dispatch considering power losses

This paper offers a reliable deterministic method for solving multi-area economic dispatch (MAED). The proposed method can handle nonlinear power losses in electrical networks and discrete and nonlinear characteristics in power plants, such as fuel change facilities and nonconvex cost functions. To this end, the presented method reformulates the products of two variables in the power loss terms as one-dimensional expressions. Then, it converts all nonlinear terms in the MAED into linear segments. Moreover, it handles discrete decisions in fuel selection through binary variables. We assess the performance of the proposed method by some MAED test systems. The results show that the method can reliably obtain accurate solutions in the adopted test systems. It converges to costs of 10604.7, 654.7, 121592.7, 124628.4, and 169528.9 respectively in 2-area 4-unit, 3-area 10-unit, 4-area 40-unit, 2-area 40-unit, and 10-area 130-unit. These findings reproduce or outperform results found in earlier optimization algorithms. Moreover, the computational time evaluations indicate that the method can solve the adopted MAED problems in less than one minute, showing its efficiency. Overall, the obtained results confirm the efficacy of the method’s efficacy in handling the MAED with discrete and nonlinear terms. • A deterministic optimization method for nonconvex multi-area economic dispatch. • Reformulation and linearization of transmission losses. • Handling disjoint generation bounds (prohibited operating zone) by binary variables. • Employing mixed integer techniques to address fuel choice. • Addressing wire drawing effects (valve-point effects) by the multiple-choice model.