Optimal Economic Dispatch Strategy for Virtual Power Plants Considering Flexible Resource Responses in Uncertain Scenarios

Virtual power plants efficiently aggregate distributed energy resources with small capacities but large quantities to participate in electricity market transactions through advanced control technologies. As the number of distributed power sources increases, issues such as output volatility and optimal decision-making need to be addressed. To tackle these problems, this paper proposes an optimal economic dispatch strategy for virtual power plants that accounts for flexible resource responses under uncertain scenarios. First, a combined prediction model based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and an improved bidirectional multi-gated long short-term memory network is established to achieve accurate prediction of renewable energy output. On this basis, a price–demand elasticity matrix is constructed to characterize the spatiotemporal coupling effect of time-of-use electricity prices on load, and a demand response model based on optimal time-of-use electricity pricing is established. Meanwhile, an improved Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to achieve efficient and precise solutions. Finally, the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method are validated and illustrated through an improved IEEE-33 bus test system.