Min Dong

Sun Sun, Min Dong, Ben Liang

The large-scale integration of renewable generation directly affects the reliability of power grids. We investigate the problem of power balancing in a general renewable-integrated power grid with storage and flexible loads. We consider a power grid that is supplied by one conventional generator (CG) and multiple renewable generators (RGs) each co-located with storage,and is connected with external markets. An aggregator operates the power grid to maintain power balance between supply and demand. Aiming at minimizing the long-term system cost, we first propose a real-time centralized power balancing solution, taking into account the uncertainty of the renewable generation, loads, and energy prices. We then provide a distributed implementation algorithm, significantly reducing both computational burden and communication overhead. We demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is asymptotically optimal as the storage capacity increases and the CG ramping constraint loosens. Moreover, the distributed implementation enjoys a fast convergence rate, and enables each RG and the aggregator to make their own decisions. Simulation shows that our proposed algorithm outperforms alternatives and can achieve near-optimal performance for a wide range of storage capacity.

Tianyi Li, Min Dong

We consider joint energy storage management and load scheduling at a residential site with integrated renewable generation. Assuming unknown arbitrary dynamics of renewable source, loads, and electricity price, we aim at optimizing the load scheduling and energy storage control simultaneously in order to minimize the overall system cost within a finite time period. Besides incorporating battery operational constraints and costs, we model each individual load task by its requested power intensity and service durations, as well as the maximum and average delay requirements. To tackle this finite time horizon stochastic problem, we propose a real-time scheduling and storage control solution by applying a sequence of modification and transformation to employ Lyapunov optimization that otherwise is not directly applicable. With our proposed algorithm, we show that the joint load scheduling and energy storage control can in fact be separated and sequentially determined. Furthermore, both scheduling and energy control decisions have closed-form solutions for simple implementation. Through analysis, we show that our proposed real-time algorithm has a bounded performance guarantee from the optimal T-slot look-ahead solution and is asymptotically equivalent to it as the battery capacity and time period goes to infinity. The effectiveness of joint load scheduling and energy storage control by our proposed algorithm is demonstrated through simulation as compared with alternative algorithms.

Tianyi Li, Min Dong

We consider the residential energy storage management system with integrated renewable generation, with the availability of bidirectional energy flow from and to the grid thorough buying and selling. We propose a real-time bidirectional energy control algorithm, aiming to minimize the net system cost, due to energy buying and selling and battery deterioration and inefficiency from storage activities, within a given time period, subject to the battery operational constraints and energy buying and selling constraints. We formulate the problem as a stochastic control optimization problem. We then modify and transform this difficult problem into one that enables us to develop the real-time energy control algorithm through Lyapunov optimization. Our developed algorithm is applicable to arbitrary and unknown statistics of renewable generation, load, and electricity prices. It provides a simple closed-form control solution only based on current system states with minimum complexity for real-time implementation. Furthermore, the solution structure reveals how the battery energy level and energy prices affect the decision on energy flow and storage. The proposed algorithm possesses a bounded performance guarantee to that of the optimal non-causal T-slot look-ahead control policy. Simulation shows the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm as compared with alternative real-time and non-causal algorithms, as well as the effect of selling-to-buying price ratio and battery inefficiency on the storage behavior and system cost.

Fatemeh Amirnavaei, Min Dong

We consider wireless transmission over fading channel powered by energy harvesting and storage devices. Assuming a finite battery storage capacity, we design an online power control strategy aiming at maximizing the long-term time-averaged transmission rate under battery operational constraints for energy harvesting. We first formulate the stochastic optimization problem, and then develop techniques to transform this problem and employ techniques from Lyapunov optimization to design the online power control solution. In particular, we propose an approach to handle unbounded channel fade which cannot by directly dealt with by Lyapunov framework. Our proposed algorithm determines the transmission power based only on the current energy state of the battery and channel fade conditions,without requiring any knowledge of the statistics of energy arrivals and fading channels. Our online power control solution is a three-stage closed-form solution depending on the battery energy level. It not only provides strategic energy conservation through the battery energy control, but also reveals an opportunistic transmission style based on fading condition, both of which improve the long-term time-averaged transmission rate. We further characterize the performance bound of our proposed algorithm to the optimal solution with a general fading distribution. Simulation results demonstrate a significant performance gain of our proposed online algorithm over alternative online approaches.

Juncheng Wang, Ben Liang, Min Dong et al.

We consider online convex optimization (OCO) with multi-slot feedback delay, where an agent makes a sequence of online decisions to minimize the accumulation of time-varying convex loss functions, subject to short-term and long-term constraints that are possibly time-varying. The current convex loss function and the long-term constraint function are revealed to the agent only after the decision is made, and they may be delayed for multiple time slots. Existing work on OCO under this general setting has focused on the static regret, which measures the gap of losses between the online decision sequence and an offline benchmark that is fixed over time. In this work, we consider both the static regret and the more practically meaningful dynamic regret, where the benchmark is a time-varying sequence of per-slot optimizers. We propose an efficient algorithm, termed Delay-Tolerant Constrained-OCO (DTC-OCO), which uses a novel constraint penalty with double regularization to tackle the asynchrony between information feedback and decision updates. We derive upper bounds on its dynamic regret, static regret, and constraint violation, proving them to be sublinear under mild conditions. We further apply DTC-OCO to a general network resource allocation problem, which arises in many systems such as data networks and cloud computing. Simulation results demonstrate substantial performance gain of DTC-OCO over the known best alternative.