Review of economic dispatch in multi-area power system: State-of-the-art and future prospective

•The study presents a comprehensive review on optimal economic dispatch in single and multi-area power system.•The review covers the formulation of the MAELD; cost functions and constraints and techniques applied in its solution.•The relationship between the MAELD and other ancillary services such as unit commitment, electrical vehicle, smart grid and demand side management is concisely reviewed.•Optimal economic dispatch carried out in centralized and non-centralized (decentralized and distributed approaches established devoid of central operator) is comprehensively surveyed.•The central aim of the review is to establish state-of-the-art in the multi-area economic dispatch and identify future research avenues for improving the existing techniques and developing novel ones. Efficient and cost-effective coordination of online generation facilities is essential to the reliable operation multi-area power system (PS) especially in a deregulated environment. This made multi-area system economic load dispatch (MAELD) one of the most crucial services in modern PS due to economic and environmental considerations. The aim of MAELD is to optimally compute the generation levels and cross-border energy trading between adjacent areas at a minimum cost of generation and transmission while fulfilling physical and operational constraints. MAELD problem can be solved using either centralized or decentralized approaches. Centralized approach requires a central coordinator that determines optimal conditions of the network. While the decentralized approaches decouple the network into several independent sub-units. The decoupling approach devoid of central operator improves data fidelity, information privacy, and decision independence among the adjacent areas. This paper comprehensively reviews the recent advances in MAELD, which covers the problem formulation and techniques applied for the solution. The relationship between the MAELD and other ancillary services such as unit commitment, electrical vehicle and demand side management is concisely reviewed. The cornerstone of the survey is to establish state-of-the-art in the MAELD and identify future research avenues for improving the existing techniques and developing novel ones.