A tutorial description of an interior point method and its applications to security-constrained economic dispatch

The authors deal with the use of successive linear programming (SLP) for the solution of the security-constrained economic dispatch (SCED) problem. They tutorially describe an interior point method (IPM) for the solution of linear programming (LP) problems, discussing important implementation issues that really make this method far superior to the simplex method. A study of the convergence of the SLP technique and a practical criterion to avoid oscillatory behavior in the iteration process are also proposed. A comparison of the proposed method with an efficient simplex code (MINOS) is carried out by solving SCED problems on two standard IEEE systems. The results show that the interior point technique is reliable, accurate, and more than two times as fast as the simplex algorithm