Multi-agent autonomous decision making in smart micro-grids’ energy management: A decentralized approach

Abstract

Current energy grids are moving toward utilization of renewable and non-polluting energy sources. Micro-grids, as an emerging means for a localized management, supervision, and control of energy production and consumption are changing the traditional centralized grid topology, making it more distributed and autonomous. However, the fluctuating nature of renewable energy systems make the energy demand control very complex. Hence, one of the challenges in Micro-grid energy control and management is to handle any deviation from the prior forecasted power generation/consumption by optimizing the usage of storage and backup generation units in a way that preserves the users’ convenience level. The majority of the proposed optimization approaches only use the centralized load shedding schemes, neglecting the effect of inconvenience it may cause to the users. In this paper, we propose a Multi-agent based decentralized algorithm for a residential grid-connected Microgrid. The focus of our work is on how to handle possible power imbalance situations with the help of an Autonomous Decentralized Multi-agent approach consisting of user agents, storage agent, and grid agent considering the users’ consumption preferences as an important factor in the decision making. We investigate the application of our proposed algorithm over a PV-based Microgrid scenario.