Today, traditional networks are changing to active grids due to the burgeoning growth of distributed energy
resources (DER), which demands scrupulous attention to technical infrastructures, as well as economic aspects. Providing energy services and spinning reserve in the market is one the features of this issue. In this
study, from economic point of view, the aggregation of DERs in a distribution network to participate in joint energy
and reserve markets is investigated. This approach, which is predicated upon price-based unit commitment method,
has considered virtually all the technical data in the proposed model. It is worth to mention that uncertainties of loads
market prices, as an inherent characteristic of the electricity markets, are treated in this study, and their effect on
the operation of virtual power plants in energy and reserve markets has been thoroughly discussed. The innovation of this paper is to consider the uncertainty in connection between the virtual power plant and the upstream network, along with the mentioned uncertainties.
To this end, in this paper, a 4-bus network is considered as a virtual power plant in which the condition of optimal operation of distributed generations, energy storage systems and removable load considering uncertainty in energy price and connection with upstream network and also, uncertainty in delivery of spinning reserve have been studied to maximize the profit of virtual power plant. Simulation has been carried out in MATLAB environment using teaching-learning based optimization algorithm (TLBO) for 24 hours on the proposed network.