An Overlapped Decomposition Optimization Method for Dynamic Economic Dispatch

The dynamic economic dispatch (DED) that considers valve-point effects is a complex non-convex and non-smooth optimization problem in power systems. Over the past few decades, multiple approaches have been developed to solve this problem. However, many of these approaches have high complexity which is not easily implemented. In contrast to most research efforts, which focus on enhancing the performance of a specific optimization algorithm, this paper presents an efficient overlapped decomposition optimization (ODO) method to solve DED with valve-point effects, by converting DED into a few easily solvable sub-problems. We first exploit the characteristics of the problem itself and present a decomposition strategy. The analysis shows that this strategy can be adopted as an effective local search operator to further improve the optimal solutions. Furthermore, an overlapped decomposition optimization method is proposed in which the study period of sub-problems has overlap. The proposed method efficiently reduces the difficulty of solving DED, so that high-quality solutions can be obtained by combining ODO with some ordinary heuristic-based algorithms. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on multiple DED problems. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method can be used as a powerful optimizer for coupled spatial-temporal scheduling problems in power systems.