Market integration allows increasing the social welfare of a given society. In most markets, integration
also raises the social welfare of the participating markets (partakers). However, electricity markets have
complexities such as transmission network congestion and requirements of power reserve that could
lead to a decrease in the social welfare of some partakers. The social welfare reduction of partakers, if it
occurs, would surely be a hindrance to the development of regional markets, since participants are
usually national systems. This paper shows a new model for the regional dispatch of energy and reserve,
and proposes as constraints that the social welfare of partakers does not decrease with respect to that
obtained from the isolated optimal operation. These social welfare constraints are characterized by their
stochastic nature and their dependence on the energy price of different operating states. The problem is
solved by the combination of two optimization models (hybrid optimization): A linear model embedded
within a meta-heuristic algorithm, which is known as the swarm version of the Means Variance Mapping
Optimization (MVMOS
). MVMOS allows incorporating the stochastic nature of social welfare constraints
through a dynamic penalty scheme, which considers the fulfillment degree along with the dynamics of
the search process.