Coordinated Multi-area Economic Dispatch via Critical Region Projection

A coordinated economic dispatch method for multi-area power systems is proposed. Choosing boundary phase angles as coupling variables, the proposed method exploits the structure of critical regions in local problems defined by active and inactive constraints. For a fixed boundary state given by the coordinator, local operators compute the coefficients of critical regions containing the boundary state and of the optimal cost functions then communicate them to the coordinator who in turn optimizes the boundary state to minimize the overall cost. By iterating between local operators and the coordinator, the proposed algorithm converges to the global optimal solution in finite steps, and it requires limited information sharing.