Title
Heuristic Optimization for the Discrete Virtual Power Plant Dispatch Problem
Abstract
We consider a virtual power plant, which is given the task of dispatching a fluctuating power supply to a portfolio of flexible consumers. The flexible consumers are modeled as discrete batch processes, and the associated optimization problem is denoted the discrete virtual power plant dispatch problem (DVPPDP). First, the nondeterministic polynomial time (NP)-completeness of the discrete virtual power plant dispatch problem is proved formally. We then proceed to develop tailored versions of the meta-heuristic algorithms hill climber and greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP). The algorithms are tuned and tested on portfolios of varying sizes. We find that all the tailored algorithms perform satisfactorily in the sense that they are able to find sub-optimal, but usable, solutions to very large problems (on the order of (10^{5}) units) at computation times on the scale of just 10 s, which is far beyond the capabilities of the optimal algorithms we have tested. In particular, GRASP sorted shows with the most promising performance, as it is able to find solutions that are both agile (sorted) and well balanced, and consistently yields the best numerical performance among the developed algorithms.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/TSG.2014.2336261
Smart Grid, IEEE Transactions  
Keywords
Field
DocType
optimisation,power generation dispatch,power generation scheduling,power plants,GRASP sorted,discrete batch processes,discrete virtual power plant dispatch problem,flexible consumers,fluctuating power supply,greedy randomized adaptive search procedure,heuristic optimization,metaheuristic algorithms hill climber,nondeterministic polynomial time completeness,Algorithms,computation time,scheduling,suboptimal control
Hill climbing,Mathematical optimization,Heuristic,GRASP,Electric power system,Virtual power plant,Engineering,Greedy randomized adaptive search procedure,Optimization problem,NP
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
5
6
1949-3053
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.37
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mette K. Petersen181.91
Lars Henrik Hansen2325.33
Jan Dimon Bendtsen34622.56
Kristian Edlund472.28
Jakob Stoustrup527452.57