Distributed energy matching and exchange scheme for demand-side optimal operation

Abstract

This paper introduces a demand-side distributed energy matching framework and operations for an Energy Service Provider (ESP). Due to the diversity, geographical location and high number of customers, managing energy transactions and resulting energy exchanges are challenging for an ESP. The envisioned ESP maintains several aggregators (e.g. Microgrids), named as Sub Service Provider (SSP) that manage customers/subscribers under their domains. The service requires customers to provide pre-committed energy profiles along with preferences over certain attributes on a day-ahead basis. The SSPs (that work under the ESP) act as agents that perform local energy matching within their own domain of customers and distributed energy matching with the colleague SSPs. The goal of the distributed energy matching is to reduce the involvement of utility (in both the day-ahead market and spot-market). In order to perform the distributed matching operation, an assignment problem is designed and solved by Linear Programming. The communicative burden among SSPs due to the exchange of energy information (i.e. to converge in the distributed matching process) is reduced by applying an adaptive microgrid (SSP) coalition formation method.