Consensus Based Approach for Economic Dispatch Problem in a Smart Grid

Economic dispatch problem (EDP) is an important class of optimization problems in the smart grid, which aims at minimizing the total cost when generating certain amount of power. In this work, a novel consensus based algorithm is proposed to solve EDP in a distributed fashion. The quadratic convex cost functions are assumed in the problem formulation, and the strongly connected communication topology is sufficient for the information exchange. Unlike centralized approaches, the proposed algorithm enables generators to collectively learn the mismatch between demand and total amount of power generation. The estimated mismatch is then used as a feedback mechanism to adjust current power generation by each generator. With a tactical initial setup, eventually, all generators can automatically minimize the total cost in a collective sense.