Joint energy and reserve dispatch in a multi-area competitive market using time-varying differential evolution

In a deregulated electricity industry, competitive bidding for energy and reserve is increasingly gaining importance and playing a decisive role in maintaining system reliability. The transmission capacity limits have a significant impact on market cost, therefore these limits should also be considered while optimizing the joint dispatch. In this paper, a detailed comparison of classical differential evolution (DE) mutation strategies is carried out to study the role of tuning parameters. For avoiding the time and labor lost in tuning DE parameters, an improved DE algorithm with time varying chaotic mutation and crossover is proposed for solving the multi-product, multi-area market dispatch problem with physical and operational constraints. The proposed approach effectively handles the complex constraints like reserve requirements, zonal power balance constraints, area spinning reserve constraints, tie-line constraints and reserve and capacity coupling constraints. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed algorithm is tested on two different test systems and is found to be better than classical DE in terms of convergence behavior and solution quality.