Development and implementation of a constrained economic dispatch program in the Mexican Energy Control Center

The authors present the real-time and the on-line study mode versions of a constrained economic dispatch program in the Mexican Energy Control Center. The program minimizes the total electrical power generation cost subject to several security and operational constraints of the Mexican interconnected multiarea hydro-thermal power system. The optimization procedure solves a succession of linear programming problems, whose structure allows the incorporation of both a greedy algorithm and the Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition principle in order to speed up the process. The obtained results have been highly satisfactory.