A Line Flow Granular Computing Approach for Economic Dispatch With Line Constraints

Line flow calculation plays a critically important role to guarantee the stable operation of power system in economic dispatch (ED) problems with line constraints. This paper presents a line flow granular computing approach for power flow calculation to assist the investigation on ED with line constraints, where the hierarchy method is adopted to divide the power network into multiple layers to reduce computational complexity. Each layer contains granules for granular computing, and the layer network is reduced by Ward equivalent retaining the PV nodes and boundary nodes of tie lines to decrease the data dimension. Then, Newton-Raphson method is applied further to calculate the power line flows within the layer. This approach is tested on IEEE 39-bus and 118-bus systems. The testing results show that the granular computing approach can solve the line flow problem in 9.2 s for the IEEE 118-bus system, while the conventional AC method needs 44.56 s. The maximum relative error of the granular computing approach in line flow tests is only 0.43%, which is quite small and acceptable. Therefore, the case studies demonstrate that the proposed granular computing approach is correct, effective, and can ensure the accuracy and efficiency of power line flow calculation.