Distributed Online Optimal Energy Management for Smart Grids

Traditionally, economic dispatch and demand response are considered separately, or implemented sequentially, which may degrade the energy efficiency of the power grids. One important goal of the optimal energy management is to maximize the social welfare through the coordination of the suppliers’ generations and customers’ demands. Thus, it is desirable to consider the interactive operation of economic dispatch and demand response, and solve them in an integrated way. This paper proposes a fully distributed online optimal energy management solution for smart grids. The proposed solution considers the economic dispatch of conventional generators, demand response of users, and operating conditions of renewable generators all together. The proposed distributed solution is developed based on market-based self-interests motivation model since this model can realize the global social welfare maximization among system participants. The proposed solution can be implemented with multi-agent system with each system participant assigned with an energy management agent. Based on the designed distributed algorithms for price updating and supply-demand mismatch discovery, the optimal energy management among agents can be achieved in a distributed way. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.