Distributed demand-side energy management scheme in residential smart grids: An ordinal state-based potential game approach

This paper proposes a distributed demand-side energy management scheme in residential smart grids based on ordinal state-based potential game (SPG) with various kinds of household electrical appliances. Involving the total electricity costs, the supply capacity limits incurred by the distribution infrastructures and the required energy demands for individual appliances, the optimal energy management (OEM) of demand-side users, i.e., homes, turns out to be a complicated optimization problem associated with a coupled objective function subject to spatially and temporally coupled constraints. Such a problem is difficult to solve in a distributed fashion. In this paper, we formulate it as an ordinal SPG, devising a distributed algorithm to achieve the optimum of the original centralized OEM with no need of any central coordinator during the process of execution. Our scheme does not require any private information of individual users to be shared, while both the optimality and convergence are obtained. We also show the scheme is robust to unreliable communications. And the proposed scheme is illustrated and verified by simulations.