Distributed Dynamic Programming-Based Approach for Economic Dispatch in Smart Grids

In this paper, the discrete economic dispatch problem is formulated as a knapsack problem. An effective distributed strategy based on distributed dynamic programming algorithm is proposed to optimally allocate the total power demand among different generation units considering the generation limits and ramping rate limits. The proposed distributed strategy is implemented based on a multiagent system framework which only requires local computation and communication among neighboring agents. Thus, it enables the sharing of computational and communication burden among distributed agents. In addition, the proposed strategy can be implemented with asynchronous communication, which may lead to simpler implementation and faster convergence speed. Simulation results with a four-generator system and the IEEE 162-bus system are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed strategy.