A Dual Bisection Approach to Economic Dispatch of Generators with Prohibited Operating Zones

We address economic dispatch of power generators with prohibited operating zones. The problem can be formulated as an optimization program with a quadratic cost, non-convex local operating constraints, and a scalar quadratic coupling constraint accounting for load demand and power losses. A duality-based resolution approach integrating a bisection iterative scheme is proposed to reduce computational complexity while guaranteeing finite time feasibility of the primal iterates and a cost improvement throughout iterations. Extensive simulations show that the approach outperforms state-of-the-art competitors and consistently computes feasible primal solutions with a close-to-zero optimality gap at a low computational cost.