The integration of electrical and heating systems has great potential to enhance the flexibility of power systems to accommodate more renewable power such as the wind and solar. This study was to investigate an optimal way to integrate the energy of both systems in urban areas. The amount of energy conversion between the electrical system and heating system was optimally decided so that the demand within both systems could be met at the least operational cost. Besides, the best node to join with the electrical system and heating system was chosen by consideration of the energy transmission loss. The mathematical formulation of the optimization problem was detailed as a large-scale non-linear program (LSNLP) in this paper. A decomposition-coordination algorithm was proposed to solve this LSNLP. At last, a 6-bus electrical power system with 31-node heating transmission system was studied to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The results showed that coordinated optimization of the energy distribution have significant benefits for reducing wind curtailment, operation cost, and energy losses. The proposed model and methodology could help system operators with decision support in the emerging integrated energy systems. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.