Differential Evolution Aplication in Portfolio optimization for Electricity Markets

Smart Grid technologies enable the intelligent integration and management of distributed energy resources. Also, the advanced communication and control capabilities in smart grids facilitate the active participation of aggregators at different levels in the available electricity markets. The portfolio optimization problem consists in finding the optimal bid allocation in the different available markets. In this scenario, the aggregator should be able to provide a solution within a timeframe. Therefore, the application of metaheuristic approaches is justified, since they have proven to be an effective tool to provide near-optimal solutions in acceptable execution times. Among the vast variety of metaheuristics available in the literature, Differential Evolution (DE) is arguably one of the most popular and successful evolutionary algorithms due to its simplicity and effectiveness. In this paper, the use of DE is analyzed for solving the portfolio optimization problem in electricity markets. Moreover, the performance of DE is compared with another powerful metaheuristic, the Particle Swarm optimization (PSO), showing that despite both algorithms provide good results for the problem, DE overcomes PSO in terms of quality of the solutions.