A direct method for multi-area production simulation

This paper presents a new approach for multi-area production cost and marginal cost calculations. It is an improvement on segmented global simultaneous decomposition-simulation approach (SEG-GSIDES) that has been developed for computing the production cost indices in a multi-area configuration. In SEG-GSIDES, the energy production of a unit is derived from the difference between the expected unserved energy before and after the unit commitment. The new approach is devised by using the concept of probability of need of a unit. Application of this concept facilitates the calculation of the production cost and marginal cost. This concept is illustrated by using the IEEE-RTS system. It is shown that this new approach is much faster and gives more consistent results.