A Benders Dual Decomposition Approach for Multi-Area Economic Dispatch with valve point effect*

In this paper, we consider the multi-area economic dispatch problem with valve point effect. The valve point effect depict the phenomenon that the pulsation effect that occurs when the turbine gas valve opens suddenly is superimposed on the unit consumption curve, which makes the optimization problem to be non-convex and non-stationary. In order to find its optimal solution, we first reformulate the original optimization problem into a mixed integer linear program (MILP) by linearizing its objective function. Then, we leverage the Benders dual decomposition method to solve the MILP, where the Lagrangian relaxation is utilized to the Benders subproblems so as to accelerate the solution efficiency. Finally, we conduct a numerical example to validate the theoretical analysis.