Author(s)

M. Jamil, V. Popov, S. Ahmed & Z. A. Khan

Abstract

The economic dispatch (ED) is one of the most important operational functions of the modern energy management system. The purpose of the economic dispatch is to find the optimum generation among the existing units, such that the total generation cost is minimized while simultaneously satisfying the power balance equations and various other constraints in the system. The unit commitment or pre-dispatch problem is to select optimally out of the available generating sources to operate in meeting the expected load along with a specified margin of operating reserve over a specified period of time. The other aspect of economic dispatch is to optimize the electricity generation among the generating units actually paralleled with the system in terms of supply of the power system. In this paper, the Taguchi method, a powerful tool for process optimization and design, is used to solve the Energy Dispatch problem in order to minimize the cost function. An orthogonal array, the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) are employed to obtain the optimal level of the parameters involved in the cost function. The results obtained are approximately equal to the minimum cost irrespective of the chosen values of the level of parameters and proves that the Taguchi method is insensitive to the choice of initial values for parameters. The optimized result has been verified using the confirmatory test. Keywords: economic dispatch, energy management, optimization, Taguchi approach, analysis of variance.

Keywords

economic dispatch, energy management, optimization, Taguchi approach, analysis of variance.