Distributed Economic Dispatch using Framework for Network Co-simulation

This paper presents a framework for testing distributed control algorithms that solve economic dispatch problems. Often times during development, distributed control algorithms are studied theoretically in detail and implemented on a single simulator as a numerical simulation. In order to realistically model a distributed control system, co-simulation of multiple simulators is required. The work presented here enables this through a framework developed using Framework for Network co-simulation (FNCS). This paper implements a consensus based distributed algorithm to solve economic dispatch in presence of communication network delays. Every agent participating in distributed economic dispatch is modeled as an individual simulator communicating only through a communication network simulator, making it a truly distributed framework. Tests are conducted to validate the algorithm against different types of communication network effects like delays and different data rates. This framework can be easily reused to test other types of distributed algorithms.