1318 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO.
2, FEBRUARY 2016
Minimum-Time Consensus-Based Approach
for Power System Applications
Tao Yang, Member, IEEE, Di Wu, Member, IEEE, Yannan Sun, Member, IEEE,
and Jianming Lian, Member, IEEE
Abstract—This paper presents minimum-time
consensus-based distributed algorithms for power sys-
tem applications, such as load shedding and economic
dispatch. The proposed algorithms are capable of solving
these problems in a minimum number of time steps instead
of asymptotically as in most of the existing studies.
Moreover, these algorithms are applicable to both undi-
rected and directed communication networks. Simulation
results are used to validate the proposed algorithms.
Index Terms—Distributed control, load shedding,
minimum-time consensus, multi-agent systems, optimal
dispatch.
I. I NTRODUCTION
P OWER system operation requires instantaneous balance
between generation and load. This balancing is achieved
through scheduling (e.g., unit commitment and economic dis-
patch) and real-time control (e.g., automatic generation and
primary frequency control). Generation redispatch and load
shedding may also be employed under contingencies. Currently,
most of these scheduling and control are designed and deployed
in centralized schemes, where a single control center accesses
states and provides control signals for the entire system. This
centralized control framework may be subjected to performance
limitations, such as high communication requirement and cost,
substantial computational burden, limited flexibility and scala-
bility, and disrespect of privacy. It is thus desirable to develop
distributed approaches to overcome these limitations.
In recent years, there has been a rapid and sustained devel-
opment in the area of distributed control, multi-agent coor-
dination, and networked control [1]–[7]. Various distributed
algorithms have been developed for consensus, rendezvous, for-
mation, and optimization [8]. Thus, researchers start to apply
these distributed algorithms or their variations to power system
problems, such as load restoration [9], load shedding [10], eco-
nomic dispatch problem (EDP) [11]–[16], and plug-in electric
vehicles (PEV) charging coordination [17]–[19]. Some of these
Manuscript received February 24, 2015; revised August 28, 2015,
October 19, 2015 and November 13, 2015; accepted November 16,
2015. Date of publication November 26, 2015; date of current version
January 8, 2016. This work was supported by the Laboratory Directed
Research and Development (LDRD) program at the Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory.
The authors are with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory,
Richland, WA 99354 USA (e-mail: Tao.Yang@pnnl.gov; Di.Wu@pnnl.
gov; Yannan.Sun@pnnl.gov; Jianming.Lian@pnnl.gov).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIE.2015.2504050
0278-0046 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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papers related to the applications considered in this paper are
briefly reviewed herein.
In [10], the authors propose a novel two-step
multi-agent-based load-shedding algorithm. In the first step,
consensus-based algorithm is developed to obtain the global
information, including 1) total system overload; and 2) online
load index. In the second step, efficient load-shedding decisions
are made based on the discovered global information. For EDP,
several distributed algorithms have been proposed by choosing
the incremental cost as the consensus variable. For example,
leader–follower algorithm is designed in [11], where the
leader is capable to collect the mismatch between demand and
generation. To avoid the requirement of a leader, the authors of
[20] propose a two-level consensus-based algorithm, where the
upper level is the consensus and gradient algorithm, and the
lower level executes the classic consensus algorithm by choos-
ing the local mismatch as the consensus variable. Kar and Hug
[12] proposed a consensus + innovation algorithm, where an
innovation term ensures that total generation meets the demand.
In [16], a fully distributed gradient algorithm is proposed and
implemented in Java Agent DEvelopment framework for
simulation studies. These algorithms are applicable to the
case where the communication network is undirected, i.e., the
information exchange is bidirectional. However, it is also desir-
able to develop control and coordination algorithms that only
require directed information flow, because directed commu-
nication networks cost less than their undirected counterparts
[3], [21]. The capability of utilizing low-cost communication
networks will be desirable in future smart grid. Hence, [13],
[14] propose distributed algorithms for more general cases,
where the communication network can be either undirected or
directed. The distributed algorithm in [13] relies on the analysis
in [22] and a ratio consensus algorithm. The algorithm in [14]
estimates the mismatch with all the agents being participated
and its performance over communication networks with time
delays is studied in [23]. A distributed algorithm based on
the bisection method and the consensus-like iteration method
is developed in [24] for solving EDP with general type of
cost functions. One common property of these distributed
algorithms is that the convergence is achieved asymptotically.
It could require an arbitrarily long time to obtain results within
a reasonable accuracy. Such a performance may not satisfy
the need in some practical applications with time constraints.
For example, for the load-shedding application, information
discovery process needs to be finished as fast as possible to
generate and deploy load-shedding plan in time [10].
 YANG et al.: MINIMUM-TIME CONSENSUS-BASED APPROACH FOR POWER SYSTEM APPLICATIONS
Motivated by the finite-time computation for consensus
[25]–[27], this paper presents minimum-time consensus-based
distributed algorithms for load shedding and EDP. The main
contributions of this work are summarized as follows.
1) For the load-shedding application, developing a dis-
tributed algorithm to discover information for directed
communication networks is a challenging problem, and
therefore, is identified as an important future work in [10].
This paper proposes an algorithm to address distributed
load-shedding over-directed communication networks.
2) Minimum-time consensus has been proposed for the clas-
sical consensus dynamics. However, in addition to the
consensus dynamics, estimation of local mismatch also
appears in the distributed control protocol for the EDP.
Thus, it is unclear whether minimum-time consensus can
be achieved in this case. In this work, we have shown that
the minimum-time consensus can be extended to address
the more complicated dynamics.
3) A key feature that differentiates the proposed algorithms
from existing ones for distributed load shedding and EDP
(e.g., [9] and [14]) is that the proposed algorithms are able
to solve these problems in a minimum number of time
steps instead of asymptotically, and therefore, accelerate
the convergence speed and alleviate the communica-
tion burden. The techniques developed in this paper can
also be applied to other power system applications, such
as load restoration [9] and PEV charging coordination
[18], [19].
This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, nota-
tions and some preliminaries on graph theory are introduced.
Sections III and IV present minimum-time consensus-based
distributed algorithms for load shedding and EDP, respectively.
In particular, both undirected and direct communication net-
works are considered in load-shedding problem. Section V
presents case studies and compares the performance of the
proposed algorithms with the ones in existing studies. Finally,
concluding remarks are offered in Section VI.
II. P RELIMINARIES AND N OTATIONS
We first recall some basic concepts in graph theory [28].
Let G = (V, E) denote a directed graph (digraph) with the set
of nodes (agents) V = {1, . . . , N } and the set of edges E ⊆
V × V. A directed edge from node i to node j is denoted by
(i, j) ∈ E. A graph is undirected if (i, j) ∈ E implies (j, i) ∈
E. All nodes that can transmit information to node i directly
are said to be in-neighbors of node i and belong to the set
Ni+ = {j ∈ V | (j, i) ∈ E}. The cardinality of Ni+ is called the
in-degree of node i and is denoted by d+ +
i = |Ni |. The nodes
which receive information from agent i belong to the set of out-
neighbors of node i, denoted by Ni− = {j ∈ V | (i, j) ∈ E}.
The cardinality of Ni− is called the out-degree of node i and
is denoted by d− −
i = |Ni |. It is assumed that node i belongs to
both its in-neighbor set and out-neighbor set, i.e., i ∈ Ni+ and
i ∈ Ni− . A directed path from node i1 to ik is a sequence of
nodes {i1 , . . . , ik }, such that (ij , ij+1 ) ∈ E for j = 1, . . . , k −
1. A digraph is said to be strongly connected if there exists a
directed path between any pair of distinct nodes. If d+ i = di
−
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1319
for all i ∈ V, then the directed graph is balanced. For undi-
rected graphs, d+ −
i = di always holds. Hence, the superscripts
are dropped, and di is used to denote the degree of node i.
In this paper, variables in boldface represent vectors or
matrices. A nonnegative matrix A ∈ Rn×n is a column
(row) stochastic matrix if the entries in each column (row) sum
to 1. A nonnegative matrix A ∈ Rn×n is primitive if Am has
only positive elements for some positive integer m. For a matrix
A ∈ Rn×n , its kernel is defined as ker(A) = {v ∈ Rn |Av =
0}. 0 and 1 denote the column vectors with all entries being 0
and 1, respectively. diag(a1 , . . . , aN ) denotes a diagonal matrix
with diagonal entries a1 , . . . , aN . eTi ∈ R1×n denotes the row
vector whose single one entry is at the ith position and all other
entries are equal to zero. In denotes the identity matrix of size
n × n.
III. D ISTRIBUTED M INIMUM - TIME A LGORITHM FOR L OAD
S HEDDING
When generation is insufficient to support all loads under
contingencies, efficient load shedding needs to be deployed to
maintain the supply–demand balance. Xu et al. [10] proposed
a novel multi-agent-based load-shedding algorithm, which can
make efficient load-shedding decision based on discovered
global information in undirected communication networks. The
main challenge and essential part of this method is the global
information discovery through information exchange in a dis-
tributed manner. Proper load-shedding decisions are then made
at each agent based on load-priority tables together with the
discovered total system overload and online load index. The
information discovery algorithms are based on average consen-
sus, which converges asymptotically. A particle swarm opti-
mization approach is also proposed for designing coefficients of
information exchange and therefore improving the convergence
speed. In order to further enhance the performance of multi-
agent-based load shedding, in this section, two algorithms are
proposed to realize information discovery in a minimum num-
ber of time steps for undirected and directed communication
networks, respectively. The proposed methods are motivated by
the finite-time computation for consensus [25]–[27] and rely on
the analysis of the rank of a square Hankel matrix constructed
from local states. These local states are obtained by execut-
ing the classical consensus dynamics, which is asymptotically
stable on the consensus manifold.
The algorithms presented in this section are for average sys-
tem overload discovery, but they can also be readily adopted
for online load discovery by modeling the load index vector as
a consensus variable in the same way as [10].
A. Undirected Communication Networks
The proposed algorithm for undirected communication net-
works relies on the consensus protocol in the following equa-
tion:

n
wi (k + 1) = wi (k)+ aij (wj (k)−wi (k)), i ∈ {1, . . . , n}
j=1
(1)
 1320
where wi (k) is the average system overload estimated by bus
i at time step (iteration) k 1 , n is the number of agents partic-
ipating in information discovery, and aij is the edge weight
(coefficient of the information exchange between buses i and j),
with appropriate initial condition wi (0) = PGi − PLi , where
PGi and PLi are the local generation and load of bus i, respec-
tively. The coefficient aij = 0 if i = j or buses i and j are not
directly connected; otherwise, aij ∈ (0, 1). The nonzero edge
weights aij must satisfy (2) to guarantee convergence [10]
2 store the successive values of wi (k).
0 < aij <
di + dj − 2
where di is agent i’s degree, i.e., the number of agents con-
nected to node i including itself.
If each agent has the capability to store local states for a
few time steps, a Hankel matrix can be constructed. The aver-
age system overload can then be calculated in a minimum
number of steps based on the local states and normalized ker-
nel of the Hankel matrix, as explained below. At time step
k = 2j − 1 (thus k is odd), where j = 1, 2, . . ., agent i stores
its successive states wi (0), wi (1), . . . , wi (2j − 1). The differ-
ence between these successive values is then calculated in (3)
and stored
wi (k  )  wi (k  ) − wi (k  − 1), k  = 1, . . . , k.
A square Hankel matrix of dimension j × j is constructed for
each agent, as shown below
⎡ ⎤
wi (1) wi (2) . . . wi (j)
⎢wi (2) wi (3) . . . wi (j + 1) ⎥
⎢ ⎥
Hji  ⎢ . .. . .. ⎥. (4)
⎣ . . . . . . ⎦
wi (j) wi (j + 1) . . . wi (2j − 1)
The rank of Hankel matrix is examined at each time step.
When it becomes singular, its normalized kernel β (i) =
(i) (i)
[β1 , . . . , βMi −1 , 1]T is computed, where Mi is the dimension
of the Hankel matrix when it starts to become singular. The
average system overload can be calculated as
wMT
i
β (i)
μ = lim wi (k) =
k→∞ 1T β (i)
where wMi = [wi (0), . . . , wi (Mi − 1)]T . Following the simi-
lar analysis as [26, Th. 1], it can be shown that Mi is equal to
the degree of a minimal polynomial of the matrix pair (Ci , A)
with Ci  eTi ∈ R1×n and A  In − L, where the Laplacian
n
matrix L = [ij ] is defined as ii = j=1 aij and ij = −aij
for j = i. Therefore, it is impossible to compute the average
system overload by local states within time steps less than 2Mi .
The above procedure to discover the average system over-
load in a minimum number of time steps is summarized in
Algorithm 1. Since 2Mi is the minimum time steps required to
discover the consensus value, Algorithm 1 is called minimum-
time consensus-based algorithm. The graph-theoretical charac-
terization of the required number of time steps is established
1 The physical meaning of w (k) is the local estimation at time step k of the
i
average system overload when the system disturbance occurs, rather than the
sample of local system imbalance at time step k.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2016
Algorithm 1. Distributed minimum-time algorithm for infor-
mation discovery (undirected communication networks)
1: Data: Edge weight aij that satisfies (2), PGi and PLi for all
i ∈ {1, . . . , n}.
2: Result: The average system overload.
3: for k = 0, 1, . . . do
4: for i = 1 to n do
5: Run iteration (1) with initial conditions w(0) =
[w1 (0), . . . , wn (0)]T where wi (0) = PGi − PLi , and
(2)
6: if k is odd then
7: Compute the vector of differences wi by (3).
8: Construct the square Hankel matrix Hji by (4).
9: if Hji is singular then
10: Compute the normalized kernel β (i) .
11: Compute the average system overload μ by (5).
12: Return μ.
13: end if
14: end if
15: end for
16: end for
in [26, Th. 3]. It shows that the required number of time steps
(3)
for each agent is bounded in terms of two combinatorial graph
theoretical properties: the minimum external equitable partition
[29] of the graph with respect to that agent and the longest
distance for that agent.
Remark 1: Compared to the asymptotic consensus-based
algorithm in [10], the minimum-time consensus-based
Algorithm 1 also executes the same iteration (1). However, the
minimum-time consensus technique allows agent i to discover
the average system overload using local states within 2Mi time
steps, even before consensus is achieved within a reasonable
accuracy. Note that the total solving time is determined by
1) number of iterations; and 2) the required time for each
iteration. Therefore, users should select appropriate algorithms
based on 1) their preference with respect to communication cost
and convergence time; and 2) system configurations such as
communication network settings and capacity, computational
(5)
capability at each agent.
Remark 2: Algorithm 1 relies on the analysis of the rank of a
square Hankel matrix. It is shown in [26] that Hankel matrix is
guaranteed to lose rank when j = Mi . However, this property
cannot be ensured if errors exist in the signals received from
neighboring agents. In such a case, singular-value decomposi-
tion method is proposed to find the nearest defective Hankel
matrix [30]. Nevertheless, in this paper, we focus on the case
where the received state values are exact and leave the extension
to the case with noises and disturbances as future work.
Once the average system overload μ is discovered, the total
system overload can be calculated at each agent according to

n
Pnet = (PGi − PLi ) = nμ (6)
i=1
provided that n is known. The value of n and online load index
can be obtained by running an algorithm similar to Algorithm 1
 YANG et al.: MINIMUM-TIME CONSENSUS-BASED APPROACH FOR POWER SYSTEM APPLICATIONS 1321

with the load index vector being modeled as the consensus Algorithm 2. Distributed minimum-time algorithm for infor-
variable. Reference [10] provides more details on how to con- mation discovery (directed communication networks)
struct load index vectors that can be used by consensus-based
algorithms. 1: Data: Edge weight qi,j in the ratio consensus algorithm
(7) such that the matrix Q = [qi,j ] ∈ Rn×n is a primi-
tive column stochastic matrix, PGi and PLi for all i ∈
B. Directed Communication Networks {1, . . . , n}.
2: Result: The average system overload.
The algorithm proposed in the previous section is for undi-
3: for k = 0, 1, . . . do
rected communication networks, where every communication
4: for i = 1 to n do
link enables bidirectional information exchange. However, this
5: Run two iterations (7a) and (7b) simultaneously, with
may be restrictive since the information exchange may not
initial conditions given by (8), where ηi (0) = PGi −
be symmetric in practical situation. Therefore, directed com-
PLi , and store the successive values of ηi (k) and ζi (k).
munication networks are needed to model the unidirectional
6: if k is odd then
information exchange. In this section, a distributed algorithm (k )
7: Compute the ratio zi (k  ) = ηζii(k 
 ) for k = 1, . . . , k.
is proposed to discover information in a minimum number of
8: Compute the vectors of differences z i by (3).
time steps for directed communication networks.
9: Construct the Hankel matrix Hji by (4).
In general, average consensus cannot be reached for directed
graphs unless they are strongly connected and balanced [31, Th. 10: if Hji is singular then
2] and [32, Th. 1]. In [33], the authors propose a ratio consensus 11: Compute the normalized kernel β (i) .
algorithm to achieve average consensus for a directed graph that 12: Compute the average system overload μ by (10)
is strongly connected but not necessarily balanced. In this algo-
ηi (k) η T i β (i)
rithm, each agent i in a directed graph G = (V, E) maintains μ = lim = M , (10)
k→∞ ζi (k) T β (i)
ζM
two values ηi and ζi , which are referred as internal states. These i

internal states are updated according to the following equations:

 where ηMi =[ηi (0), . . . , ηi (Mi − 1)]T and ζMi
ηi (k + 1) = qi,j ηj (k) (7a) = [ζi (0), . . . , ζi (Mi − 1)]T .
j∈Ni+
13: Return μ.
 14: end if
ζi (k + 1) = qi,j ζj (k) (7b) 15: end if
j∈Ni+ 16: end for
17: end for
where qi,j is chosen so that matrix Q = [qi,j ] ∈ R|V|×|V| is
column-stochastic and primitive (a specific choice is qi,j =
1/d− −
j for i ∈ Nj and zeros otherwise), and the initial condi- overload in a minimum number of time steps. In contrast to
tions are Algorithm 1, Algorithm 2 is applicable to more general cases,
where information is exchanged unidirectionally.
η(0) = [η1 (0); . . . ; η|V| (0)], ζ(0) = 1 . (8) In Algorithm 2, at each step k, agent i runs iterations (7a)
and (7b) simultaneously, and thus 2d+ i multiplicities are per-
Since Q is column-stochastic and primitive, according to
formed, where d+ i is the in-degree of agent i. As discussed in
Perron–Frobenius theorem [34, pp. 516], limk→∞ Qk = v1T ,
Section III-A, it requires 2Mi steps for agent i to obtain the con-
where v > 0 and 1T v = 1. It can be shown that agent i ∈ V
sensus value. Thus, the computational complexity is 4Mi d+ i .
asymptotically obtains the average by taking the ratio of ηi and
For checking the rank of a square Hankel matrices, the spe-
ζi as
cial structure of Hankel matrices allows for efficient methods to
ηi (k) compute their rank. For example, in [35], a modular method is
lim zi (k) = lim proposed with complexity of O(m2 ), where m is the size of the
k→∞ k→∞ ζi (k)
|V| square matrix.
vi j=1 ηj (0) j∈V ηj (0) Similar to the previous discussion for undirected commu-
= = (9)
|V|
vi j=1 1 |V| nication networks, with the average system overload μ being
discovered, the total system overload can be obtained according
where vi is the ith element of v. to (6) if n is known. The number n and online load index can be
Motivated by this ratio consensus algorithm and the finite- obtained by running an algorithm similar to Algorithm 2 with
time computation for consensus, Algorithm 2 is proposed for the load index vector being modeled as a consensus variable.
the average system overload discovery in a directed com- Remark 3: Note that in Algorithms 1 and 2, after agent
munication network. In this algorithm, each agent constructs i obtains the exact value of the average system overload, it
the square Hankel matrix according to (4) with wi replaced still runs the iteration and thus shares its estimation of the
by z i , where z i are successive values for the ratio of inter- average system overload with its out-neighbors, because other
nal states zi rather than consensus variables. The proposed agents may require more steps to compute the average sys-
algorithm enables each agent to discover the average system tem overload. Nevertheless, all agents stop the iteration and

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 1322 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2016

communication when all the agents have obtained the exact
value, which is upper-bounded by 2n.
Remark 4: Note that Algorithms 1 and 2 can be extended
to other power system applications, such as load restoration [9]
and PEV charging coordination [18], [19], by choosing the con-
sensus variables and the initial conditions in the same way as in
these references.
IV. D ISTRIBUTED M INIMUM - TIME
A LGORITHM FOR EDP
Economic dispatch is one of fundamental problems in power
system, which is used for generation scheduling. It is essentially
[37]. All these methods require a single control center to col-
lect all generators’ cost information, run optimal dispatch, and
broadcast the optimal output level to each generator. Recently,
several consensus-based algorithms have been proposed to
solve EDP in a distributed manner, e.g., [11], [12], [20], and
[14]. Among these algorithms, [14] is applicable to directed
communication networks and fully distributed. For the case
where the directed communication network is strongly con-
nected, the authors of [14] propose a fully distributed algorithm
as shown below

λi (k + 1) = pi,j λj (k) + yi (k) (14a)
j∈Ni+

an optimization problem where the objective is to minimize the xi (k + 1) = φi (λi (k + 1)) (14b)
total generation cost while meeting total demand and satisfying 
yi (k + 1) = qi,j yj (k) − (xi (k + 1) − xi (k)) (14c)
individual generator output limits, as described below
j∈Ni+

N
min Ci (xi ) (11a) where the learning gain is a sufficiently small positive con-
xi
i=1 stant, λi (k) is the estimation of optimal incremental cost by
subject to xmin
i ≤ xi ≤ xmax
i (11b) generator i at time step k, xi (k) is the power generation of
generator i at time step k, which is an estimation of optimal

N
xi = D (11c) power generation of generator i, yi (k) is the local estimation
i=1
of the mismatch between demand and total power genera-
tion by generator i at time step k, and the edge weights are
where N is the number of generators in the power system, chosen as
xi is the power generation of generator i, Ci (xi ) is the cost 
function of generator i, xmin and xmax are the lower and
1
+, if j ∈ Ni+
i i pi,j = d i ∀i, j ∈ {1, . . . , N } (15)
upper bounds of the power generation of generator i, respec- 0, otherwise
tively,2 and D is the total demand satisfying i=1 xmin
N
i ≤D≤  1
N max −, if i ∈ Nj−
i=1 xi . Note that there are other power system short-term qi,j = dj ∀i, j ∈ {1, . . . , N } (16)
scheduling problems which consider more practical constraints. 0, otherwise
For instance, power flow and transmission thermal limits are
taken into account in optimal power flow problem, while and the projection operators are defined as
system reserve requirement, generator minimum up/down ⎧
max
cost, and time constraints are modeled in unit commitment ⎪
⎨xi , if λi > λmax
i
problem. φi (λi ) = βi λi + αi , if λmin ≤ λi ≤ λmax (17)
⎪
⎩ min
i i
Similar to [11], [12], and [14], we assume that cost functions xi , if λi < λmin
i
are in a quadratic form
where λmini = (xmin
i − αi )/βi and λmax
i = (xmax
i − αi )/βi .
(xi − αi )2 The incremental cost λi (k) in (14a) is the consensus vari-
Ci (xi ) = + γi (12)
2βi able, and all λi (k) converge to a common value. By using
2
the fact that Q = [qi,j ] ∈ RN ×N is a column-stochastic matrix,
where αi ≤ 0, βi > 0, γi ≤ 0, and 2β α
i
+ γi > 0. The incre- N
the authors show that i=1 (yi (k) + xi (k)) is invariant for all
mental cost for the generator i is then given by C· (xi )/x· = k. Furthermore, by appropriately choosing the initial condi-
i i
N
(xi − αi )/βi . According to the equal incremental cost criterion tions xi (0) and yi (0) so that i=1 (xi (0) + yi (0)) = D, all the
N
[36], EDP has a solution as agents collectively learn the mismatch as i=1 yi (k) = D −
⎧ x −α N
∗ min max i=1 xi (k), and thus it is not necessary to have some agents
⎪ i i
⎨ βi = λ , for xi < xi < xi access the entire system information. The local estimated mis-
xi −αi
< λ∗ , for xi = xmax (13) match yi (k) is used as a feedback in (14a) to ensure that all
⎪
⎩ xi −α
βi i

βi
i ∗
> λ , for xi = xi min
where λ∗ is the optimal incremental cost.
The conventional centralized approaches for EDP include the
lambda-iteration method and the gradient search method [36],
2 Note that in addition to static operation limits, [xmin , xmax ] could also rep-
i i
resent feasible power output of generator i in current time period, considering
the operating level in previous time period and ramping rates.
λi (k) converge to the optimal incremental cost λ∗ . Power gen-
eration xi (k) is updated according to the iteration (14b), which
converges to the optimal power generation x∗i .
By adapting the finite-time computation for consensus to
the algorithm in (14), Algorithm 3 is proposed to solve EDP
in a minimum number of time steps. In this algorithm, each
agent i iteratively runs (14), stores the successive values of gen-
erator incremental cost λi , computes the differences between

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 YANG et al.: MINIMUM-TIME CONSENSUS-BASED APPROACH FOR POWER SYSTEM APPLICATIONS 1323

Algorithm 3. Distributed minimum-time algorithm for EDP
1: Data: Edge weights pi,j and qi,j given by (15) and (16).
2: Result: Optimal incremental cost λ∗ and optimal power
generation x∗i .
3: for k = 0, 1, . . . do
4: for i = 1 to N do
5: Run iteration (14), and store the successive values of
λi (k).
6: if k is odd then
7: Compute the vector of differences λi by (3).
8: Construct the Hankel matrix Hji by (4).
9: if Hji is singular then
10: Compute the normalized kernel β (i) .
11: Compute λ∗ and x∗i according to
λTMi β (i)
λ∗ = lim λi (k) = , (18a)
k→∞ 1T β (i)
x∗i = φi (λ∗ ),
where λTMi = [λi (0), . . . , λi (Mi − 1)].
12: Return λ∗i and x∗i .
13: end if
14: end if
15: end for
16: end for
these successive values λi according to (3) with wi replaced by
λi , and constructs the square Hankel matrix according to (4)
with wi replaced by λi . The rank of the Hankel matrix is then
checked by each agent at each odd-number time step. When
it becomes singular, its normalized kernel β (i) is calculated.
Finally, each agent computes the optimal incremental cost by
(18a) and the optimal power generation by (18b). The proposed
distributed algorithm enables each agent to compute the incre-
mental cost and optimal generation in a minimum number of
time steps. The technique developed here can also be applied to
other asymptotic consensus-based distributed algorithms, e.g.,
[11]–[13].
Remark 5: Note that Algorithm 3 is a distributed method to
solve an operational scheduling problem (e.g., 5-min economic
dispatch), rather than to control generators’ instantaneous out-
put in real time. However, it solves the problem in a minimum
number of time steps rather than asymptotically as in existing
studies [11]–[13]. The iteration process in (14) only happens
within each virtual agent, rather than being physically real-
ized in each generator. Once the optimal solution is obtained,
each generator will be dispatched the same as existing practice
except the generator output level is determined in a distributed
manner rather than determined and broadcasted at a control
center.
Remark 6: Note that the iteration (14) in Algorithm 3 can be
written in the following composite form:
where λ = [λ1 , . . . , λN ]T , y = [y1 , . . . , yN ]T , P = [Pi,j ] ∈
RN ×N , and B̃ = diag(β̃1 , . . . , β̃N ), with

0, if xi (k) is saturated
β̃i =
βi , otherwise.
As shown by the eigenvalue perturbation analysis in [14, Th. 3],
when is sufficiently small, the matrix
 
P I
A
B̃(I − P) Q − I
has only one eigenvalue at 1 while all other eigenvalues are
strictly within the unit circle. Moreover,
   
λ(k) 1
converges to span
y(k) 0
 
(18b) as k → ∞. Next define Ci  eTi 0T . Thus, the same
minimum-time consensus technique which was developed for
weighted average consensus based on the minimal polynomial
of a matrix pair of the conventional consensus in [26] also
works with the matrix pair (Ci , A) in our case.
Remark 7: Note that distributed algorithms have been pro-
posed to determine generator operating point with transmission
losses recently, e.g., [15], [38]–[40]. We leave the extension of
our study to handle these constraints as future work.
Remark 8: The minimum-time consensus technique used in
this paper was developed for the classical single-integrator con-
sensus dynamics. This technique is essentially an identification
of linear time-invariant systems, which requires a sufficient
number of local states to construct the system. The identifica-
tion for the nonlinear case based on fuzzy dynamic models [41],
[42] is more challenging and interesting, and thus left as future
work.
Remark 9: Recent works [43], [44] proposed a novel two-
layer structure to solve the setpoints compensation problem
industrial processes. In these works, the optimization problem
at larger operation involves system dynamics constraints, which
is different from the optimization problem considered in this
paper where system dynamics are not involved. We leave the
extension of the minimum-time computation concept to the
optimization problem with system dynamics as future work.
V. C ASE S TUDIES
This section presents case studies and results using the pro-
posed algorithms. The test systems and parameters are adopted
from [10] and [14] for the purpose of comparison. Numerical
experiments are used to illustrate and validate the proposed
algorithms. Simulation results are compared to those in the
previous studies to demonstrate effectiveness and speed of the
proposed algorithms.

     A. Load Shedding
λ(k + 1) P I λ(k) For the load-shedding application, the proposed distributed
=
y(k + 1) B̃(I − P) Q − I y(k) algorithms have been tested for both undirected and directed

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 1324
Fig. 1. IEEE 5-bus power system.
Fig. 2. IEEE 14-bus power system.
communication networks. In both cases, the proposed algo-
rithms are used to discover the average system overload. Online
load index is discovered similarly by modeling the load index
vector as the consensus variable in the same way as [10]. The
detailed procedure is omitted due to space limitation.
1) Undirected Communication Networks: Both IEEE 5-
bus and 14-bus systems adopted from [10] are used to test
Algorithm 1, which are shown in Figs. 1 and 2, respectively.
The communication network is assumed to be the same as the
topology of the physical system, and thus it is undirected.
a) IEEE 5-bus system: The system information is sum-
marized in Table I. For the purpose of comparison, the same
edge weights from [10] are used as here: a12 = 13 , a13 = 13 ,
a23 = 13 , a24 = 1/2, and a35 = 12 , which are designed using
a particle swarm optimization method to speed up the conver-
gence. For the average system overload discovery, the initial
conditions are listed in the fifth column of Table I. Following
Algorithm 1, each agent executes the average consensus pro-
tocol, stores local states for a few time steps, constructs the
square Hankel matrix, and examines the rank of the Hankel
matrix. It should be noted that the Hankel matrices for dif-
ferent agents may become singular at different time steps. For
example, the Hankel matrix at agents 1 and 2 starts to become
singular at time step k = 5 and k = 9, respectively. In partic-
ular, the Hankel matrix and its normalized kernel at k = 5 for
agent 1 are given in (19) and (20), respectively,
⎡ ⎤
−50.000 83.333 −8.333
H31 = ⎣ 83.333 −8.333 13.889 ⎦ (19)
−8.333 13.889 −1.389
β (1) = [−0.167, 0, 1]T .
Agent 1 then performs calculation according to (5)
[−50.000, −100.000, −16.667][−0.167, 0, 1]T
μ= = −10
[1, 1, 1][−0.167, 0, 1]T
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2016
TABLE I
DATA OF THE IEEE 5-B US S YSTEM
Fig. 3. IEEE 5-bus with bidirectional communication: average sys-
tem overload discovery process using the algorithm in [10] versus
Algorithm 2 (stopping time is indicated by the vertical blue line).
TABLE II
DATA OF THE IEEE 14-B US S YSTEM
which is the average system overload. Similarly, agents 2–5
discover the same average system overload at k = 9. Fig. 3
visualizes the discovery processes by using the algorithm pro-
posed in [10] and Algorithm 1. As can be seen, with the
algorithm proposed in [10], all agents converge to −10 asymp-
totically. However, the errors are still big at time step 9, and
gradually decrease to less than 0.1 when k = 20. In contrast,
with Algorithm 1, all the agents discover the exact average
system overload in 9 time steps, with about 11 time steps
saved. The IEEE-14 bus system shown in Fig. 2 is used to test
Algorithm 1. The system information is summarized in Table II.
For the purpose of comparison, the optimized edge weights
from [10] are used and shown in Table III. The comparison of
the discovery processes using the algorithm proposed in [10]
and Algorithm 1 is shown in Fig. 4. As can be seen, with the
algorithm proposed in [10], it takes 50 time steps for all agents
to converge to −10 with an accuracy of 0.3. On the other hand,
using the proposed algorithm in this paper, all the agents dis-
(20) cover the exact average system overload in 27 time steps, with
about 23 time steps saved.
2) Directed Communication Networks: In this case, the
communication network is assumed to be different from the
physical network topology and is modeled as a directed
 YANG et al.: MINIMUM-TIME CONSENSUS-BASED APPROACH FOR POWER SYSTEM APPLICATIONS 1325

TABLE III
E DGE W EIGHTS OF THE IEEE 14-B US S YSTEM

Fig. 5. IEEE 14-bus with unidirectional communication: average system

overload discovery process using the ratio consensus algorithm versus
Algorithm 2 (stopping time is indicated by the vertical blue line).

TABLE IV
G ENERATOR PARAMETERS

Fig. 4. IEEE 14-bus with bidirectional communication: average sys-

tem overload discovery process using the algorithm in [10] versus
Algorithm 1 (stopping time is indicated by the vertical blue line).

graph G = (V, E), with the edge set E = {(i, i + 1), (i, i +
2)|1 ≤ i ≤ 12} ∪ {(13, 14), (13, 1), (14, 1)}. In this example,
the directed network is strongly connected, but not balanced
since for node 2, the in-degree d+ 2 = 2 which is not equal to
its out-degree d− 2 = 3. The edge weights are chosen as qi,j =
1/d− j for all i ∈ N −
j (zeros otherwise) for the linear itera-
tion (7). Fig. 5 plots the results using both the existing ratio
consensus algorithm and Algorithm 2 proposed in this paper.
Following Algorithm 2, all the agents discover the average
system overload μ = −10, but using different number of time Fig. 6. Communication topology and command agent for initialization.
steps: 55 steps (agents 4 and 12), 57 steps (agents 8, 9, and 13),
59 steps (agents 1, 10, 11 and 14), 61 steps (agents 2, 3, and 7), TABLE V
I NITIALIZATIONS
63 steps (agents 5), and 65 steps (agents 6). Nevertheless, all the
agents are able to discover the exact average system overload by
time step 65. On the other hand, using only the ratio consensus
algorithm (7), the estimated average system overload converges
−10 with an accuracy of 0.3 until time step 90. It is also inter-
esting to observe that the discovery process for this directed
network (cf., Fig. 5) is slower than the undirected network case The directed graph associated with the network is strongly
(cf., Fig. 4). connected, and agents 1 and 3 receive information from the
command agent 0. The initial conditions are listed in Table V.
The total demand is D = 1500 MW, and the learning gain is
B. EDP = 7.026 × 10−4 , which is also the value used in [14] designed
For economic dispatch, the proposed algorithm has been via a systematic method therein.
tested for two cases: without and with generator capacity con- 1) Without Generator Capacity Constraints: Following
straints. Three types of generators are considered: Type A Algorithm 3 proposed in this paper, each agent iteratively
(coal-fired steam unit), Type B (oil-fired steam unit), and Type executes (14), stores the successive values of generator incre-
C (oil-fired steam unit). The parameters of the cost functions mental cost, constructs the square Hankel matrix, and exam-
are specified in terms of α, β, and γ as given in [14, Table I] ines the rank of the Hankel matrix. Once the Hankel matrix
and listed in Table IV in this paper for readers’ convenience. becomes singular, each agent computes its normalized ker-
Consider a power network consisting of four generators, where nel. With this information being obtained, each agent finally
generators 1 and 2 are Type A generators, generator 3 is a Type computes the optimal incremental cost as (18a) and finds that
B generator, and generator 4 is a Type C generator. The com- λ∗ = 8.8405 $ /MWh. In particular, agents 1, 3 and 4 run 16
munication network is adopted from [14], as shown in Fig. 6. iterations, while agent 2 runs 18 iterations. Once the optimal

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 1326 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2016
Fig. 7. Solving EDP for the unconstrained case using the algorithm in
[14] versus Algorithm 3 whose stopping time is indicated by the verti-
cal blue line. (a) Generator incremental cost ($/MWh). (b) Dynamics of
incremental cost at agent 3.
incremental cost λ∗ is computed, each agent then finds the
optimal generations x∗1 = 577.5279 MW, x∗2 = 577.5279 MW,
x∗3 = 254.9880 MW, and x∗4 = 89.9563 MW x∗i = βi λ∗ + αi .
These results are the same as the ones obtained using the
algorithm proposed in [14]. As can be seen from Fig. 7(a),
with Algorithm 3, all agents find the optimal incremental
cost λ∗ = 8.8405 $ /MWh at time step 17. In contrast, with
the algorithm proposed in [14], the solution errors are about
0.02 $/MWh at time step 17 and the corresponding genera-
tion errors are as large as 6 MW. The incremental cost and
generation output gradually converge to the optimal values
with a reasonable accuracy roughly at time step 50. Since
Algorithm 3 executes the same iteration as the algorithm in [14]
to obtain the required local states for Hankel matrix construc-
tion, the two algorithms result in the same dynamics before
Algorithm 3 computes the exact consensus value at the min-
imum time step for each agent. As an example, Fig. 7(b)
highlights the different dynamics of the two algorithms at
agent 3, where the vertical axis is zoomed into the range of
[8.8, 8.85].
2) With Generator Capacity Constraints: The genera-
tor capacity limits are imposed in this case. It is found that
Algorithm 3 is still capable of obtaining the optimal incremen-
tal cost λ∗ = 8.8405 $ /MWh. In particular, agents 1 and 2 use
24 time steps, while agents 3 and 4 use 28 time steps. Thus,
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Fig. 8. Solving EDP for the constrained case using the algorithm in
[14] versus Algorithm 3 whose stopping time is indicated by the verti-
cal blue line. (a) Generator incremental cost ($/MWh). (b) Dynamics of
incremental cost at agent 1.
all the agents are able to compute the optimal incremental cost
at time step k = 27 as indicated by the thick vertical lines in
Fig. 8(a), while the solution errors using the algorithm in [14]
are about 0.002 $ /MWh at time step 27, resulting about 1.8
MW mismatch between generation and load. Fig. 8(b) high-
lights the different dynamics of the two algorithms at agent 1.
Compared to the unconstrained case, the required number of
time steps increases, but is still smaller than the number of time
steps needed when using the algorithm without the minimum-
time computation technique. Moreover, the exact values are
obtained rather than their approximations.
VI. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented minimum-time consensus-based
distributed algorithms for power system applications including
load shedding and economic dispatch. The proposed algorithms
solved these problems in a minimum number of time steps
rather than asymptotically, by using local states with a min-
imum number of time steps. Simulation results showed that
the solution can be obtained in a minimum time steps using
the proposed algorithms. There are several interesting future
directions: 1) extend the existing methodology by considering
potential impacts of the practical communication network, such
as time delays and packet dropouts; 2) design (minimum-time)
 YANG et al.: MINIMUM-TIME CONSENSUS-BASED APPROACH FOR POWER SYSTEM APPLICATIONS
distributed algorithms to accommodate additional physical con-
straints as in optimal power flow and unit commitment prob-
lems; and 3) extend the concept of minimum-time computation
to nonlinear systems and wide practical network-control sys-
tems.
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 1328 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2016
Tao Yang (M’12) received the M.S. degree
(with distinction) in control engineering from
City University, London, U.K., in 2004, and
the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from
Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA,
in 2012.
From 2012 to 2014, he was an ACCESS
Postdoctoral Researcher with the ACCESS
Linnaeus Centre, Royal Institute of Technology,
Stockholm, Sweden. He joined the Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA,
USA, in 2014, and is currently a Research Scientist with the Energy
and Environment Directorate. His research interests include distributed
control and optimization in power systems, cyber physical systems,
networked control systems, and multi-agent systems.
Di Wu (M’12) received the B.S. and M.S.
degrees in electrical engineering from Shanghai
Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 2003
and 2006, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in
electrical and computer engineering from Iowa
State University, Ames, IA, USA, in 2012.
He is currently a Senior Power System
Engineer with the Electricity Infrastructure
Group, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
(PNNL), Richland, WA, USA. His research inter-
ests include distributed control and coordination
in power systems, operational planning and optimization of energy
storage, power system dynamic simulation, impacts of plug-in elec-
tric vehicles on power systems, and planning of national energy and
transportation infrastructure.
Dr. Wu serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE P OWER AND
E NERGY T ECHNOLOGY S YSTEMS J OURNAL.
Authorized licensed use limited to: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SILCHAR. Downloaded on August 22,2022 at 14:16:47 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Yannan Sun (M’11) received the B.S. degree
in mathematics from the University of Science
and Technology of China, Hefei, China, in 2004,
and the M.S. degree in statistics and the Ph.D.
degree in mathematics from Washington State
University, Pullman, WA, USA, in 2007 and
2010, respectively.
She joined the Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA, in 2010, and
is currently a Senior Research Scientist with
the Electricity Infrastructure Group. Her research
interests include multivariate risk (multivariate extremes and risk mea-
sures), statistical modeling, machine learning, and applying mathe-
matical and statistical methods in power engineering and building
control.
Jianming Lian (M’10) received the B.S.
degree (highest honors) in automation from the
University of Science and Technology of China,
Hefei, China, in 2004, and the M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees in electrical engineering from Purdue
University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, in 2007 and
2009, respectively.
He is currently a Senior Research Engineer
with the Electricity Infrastructure Group, Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA,
USA. From 2010 to 2011, he was a Postdoctoral
Research Associate with the Center for Advanced Power Systems,
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA, where he was involved
in various projects related to the development of a future all-electric
ship supported by the Office of Naval Research. His research inter-
ests include the application of distributed control to the power grid and
building systems, and the use of responsive loads for providing grid
services.