2018 Competition on operational planning of sustainable power systems: Testsbeds and results

This paper concerns with the development of two new testbeds, the associated datasets, and the analysis of the results obtained by applying different heuristic optimization algorithms that participated in the 2018 panel and competition on”Emerging heuristic optimization algorithms for operational planning of sustainable electrical power systems”. This activity was organized by the IEEE PES Working Group on Modern Heuristic Optimization (WGMHO), under the IEEE PES Analytic Methods in Power Systems (AMPS) Committee. This competition builds upon other previous competitions focused on the application of optimal power flow (OPF) to tackle schedulling problems of electrical power systems. Unlike the previous competitions, the new test beds consider more factors reflecting the stochasticity associated to renewable power generation, controllable loads, and electric vehicles. Developers of different emerging algorithms were challenged to perform algorithmic improvements and tuning within a limited computing budget. To this aim, the organizers of the competition developed and provided a set of encrypted codes for problem evaluation (i.e. calculation of objective function and constraints and saving of results). The results obtained by the best performing algorithms point out the relevance of modern heuristic optimization to tackle the complexity of stochastic OPF, without resorting to problem simplifications, and within a restricted computing budget.