Energy management in residential communities with shared storage based on multi-agent systems: Application to smart grids

The evolution towards smart grids (SGs) is mainly characterized by the integration of renewable energy sources (RESs) throughout the grid. The intermittent nature of these sources necessitated the installation of energy storage systems (ESSs) to improve the efficiency and reliability in the power system. Moreover, the ongoing high price of batteries has encouraged the installation of shared ESSs in residential communities. However, managing the shared ESS and the energy flows in the community is considered a key challenge. In order to handle this issue, we introduce a novel energy management system (EMS), namely Energy Management In residential COmmunities with shared storage based on multi-agent systems (EMICO). It finds the optimal energy trading operations between households, as well as the operations of the shared ESS that minimize the total energy losses. We first propose a new cluster-based architecture for the residential community in which we integrate Internet of Energy (IoE) devices to manage energy flows and find the shortest path to transfer energy with minimal loss from a cluster to the other. Then, we model our energy management problem as a constrained optimization problem and we use Lagrange multiplier method to solve it in a centralized way. In order to preserve households' privacy, we propose a decentralized approach based on multi-agent systems (MASs) to solve our problem. We test our approach on real data traces obtained from a set of households located in the United Kingdom. Numerical results show that EMICO outperforms a literature approach in terms of energy losses (up to 35.66% of reduction in energy losses), electricity bill (up to 21.21% cheaper), number of exchanged messages (up to 83.81% less messages exchanged), and length of required cables (up to 95.03% less cables required).