Assisted Energy Management in Smart Microgrids
This addresses service reliability issues for microgrid operators and users, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing demand response and pricing frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of service interruptions in smart microgrids due to competitive pricing mechanisms in demand response, by proposing forward contracts and learning brokers based on neural networks, which progressively minimize reimbursement costs and maximize overall profit.
Demand response provides utilities with a mechanism to share with end users the stochasticity resulting from the use of renewable sources. Pricing is accordingly used to reflect energy availability, to allocate such a limited resource to those loads that value it most. However, the strictly competitive mechanism can result in service interruption in presence of competing demand. To solve this issue we investigate on the use of forward contracts, i.e., service level agreements priced to reflect the expectation of future supply and demand curves. Given the limited resources of microgrids, service interruption is an opposite objective to the one of service availability. We firstly design policy-based brokers and identify then a learning broker based on artificial neural networks. We show the latter being progressively minimizing the reimbursement costs and maximizing the overall profit.