Risk-sensitive security-constrained economic dispatch via critical region exploration

Abstract

A security-constrained economic dispatch (SCED) problem is regularly solved by system operators in electric power networks to make day-ahead and real-time dispatch decisions. Preventive SCED is conservative and requires dispatch decisions that are secure against any single component failure. Corrective (recourse) actions can significantly reduce operational costs. Even with linear power flow models, corrective SCED poses significant computational challenges owing to an increase in the dimensionality arising from additional recourse decisions and the number of contingencies to guard against. This thesis analyzes the benefits of allowing recourse actions for simple networks and tackles the computational challenges of solving the problem at scale through a decomposition of the problem via a critical region exploration technique that exploits the problem structure using properties of multi-parametric linear programming. This thesis concludes with numerical results on various IEEE test networks.