A Scatter Search Heuristic for the Optimal Location, Sizing and Contract Pricing of Distributed Generation in Electric Distribution Systems

Abstract

Abstract:In this paper we present a scatter search (SS) heuristic for the optimal location, sizing and contract pricing of distributed generation (DG) in electric distribution systems. The proposed optimization approach considers the interaction of two agents: (i) the potential investor and owner of the DG, and (ii) the Distribution Company (DisCo) in charge of the operation of the network. The DG owner seeks to maximize his profits from selling energy to the DisCo, while the DisCo aims at minimizing the cost of serving the network demand, while meeting network constraints. To serve the expected demand the DisCo is able to purchase energy, through long-term bilateral contracts, from the wholesale electricity market and from the DG units within the network. The interaction of both agents leads to a bilevel programming problem that we solve through a SS heuristic. Computational experiments show that SS outperforms a genetic algorithm hybridized with local search both in terms of solution quality and computational time.

Review of Computational Intelligence Methods for Local Energy Markets at the Power Distribution Level to Facilitate the Integration of Distributed Energy Resources: State-of-the-art and Future Research

“…Ant Colony Optimization [24] Approximate Q-Learning [35] Artificial Bee Colony [32] Artificial Neural Network [38] Differential Evolution [37] Expert System [28] Fuzzy Sets [17,27,44,47] Genetic Algorithm [16,22,25,34,36,39,43] Geometric Clustering with Unsupervised Learning [42] Heuristic Optimization [21] Imperialist Competitive Algorithm [18] Multi Agent Systems [10,14,23,41,48,49] Particle Swarm Optimization [11][12][13]15,26,29,30,33,37,40,46] Reinforcement Learning [50] Scatter Search [31] Simulated Annealing [19] Support Vector Machines [45] 4.…”

“…(1) Single objective. The most common single objective is the minimization of the total operation cost [10,11,13,15,18,[23][24][25][26][27][28]30,31,34,46]. (2) Multiple objectives with weights [19,20,32,44].…”

“…Out of 41 reviewed papers, only 14 papers consider the alternating current (AC) power flow constraints at their optimization models [12,13,15,17,[29][30][31]34,35,38,40,41,43,46].…”

“…In [31], a local energy market is operated by distribution system operator. The players of the local energy market are the owner of the distributed generation units and the distribution system operator.…”

A Study on the Economic Feasibility of Stand-Alone Microgrid for Carbon-Free Island in Korea

“…Also, the interaction between distributed generation and DSO must be carefully planned [25]. The distributed generation increases along with the microgrid.…”