Distributed Absorption and Half-Search Approach for Economic Dispatch Problem in Smart Grids

The economic dispatch problem (EDP) is a significant class of optimization issues in the power system, which works on minimizing the total cost when generating a certain amount of power. A novel distributed approach for EDP is proposed in this paper. The presented approach consists of two steps. The first step, named absorption search, is to simplify the network structure through absorption searching. A flooding-based consensus approach is applied in the first step, which can be used to achieve consensus information among nodes. After the first step, only the generation nodes are kept in the network. The data collection can be completed by local computation and communication between neighbors. The first step can be considered as the stage of gathering information. In the second step, a distributed half-search algorithm makes the nodes obtain the final optimal solution in a distributed way. The results on three case studies demonstrate that the proposed approach is highly effective for solving the EDP.