Decentralizing the economic dispatch problem using a two-level incremental cost consensus algorithm in a smart grid environment

In a smart grid, effective distributed control algorithms could be embedded in distributed controllers to properly allocate electrical power among connected buses autonomously. By selecting the incremental cost of each generation unit as the consensus variable, the Incremental Cost Consensus (ICC) algorithm can solve the economic dispatch problem in a distributed manner instead of using conventional centralized approaches. In this paper, we further decrease the requirement of the communication network by using an average consensus algorithm to acquire the system power mismatch information. The mathematical formulation of the algorithms is also presented in this paper. In addition, the results of several case studies are presented to show the convergence rate of the ICC algorithm and the comparison between the previous ICC and the new two-level ICC algorithm.