A new method in power systems control and economic operation

A method for power system daily control and economic operation, called the best trace method (BTM), is described. This method is different from dynamic programming sequential truncation combination (DP-STC) and all other methods in that a constant trace line (from 1 a.m. to about 10 a.m.) is used instead of the daily actual load curve to obtain an optimal or suboptimal solution. A changeable priority list is used in a dynamic programming (DP) search for the solution, according to the daily shape and the system status. Two power systems are used to test the performance of this method. It is found that the computation time of DP-BTM is about 10 times faster than that of DP-STC on average, and that the cost saving from DP-BTM is in the range of 0.1-0.6% compared with DP-STC method