A Generalized Nash Equilibrium Approach for Autonomous Energy Management of Residential Energy Hubs

The development of the cutting-edge technologies in cogeneration and trigeneration has led to a rapid transition toward integrated energy systems and the mushrooming of energy hubs, calling for effective energy management schemes. This paper proposes a distributed algorithm for autonomous energy management (AEM) of a cluster of residential energy hubs. Given the interactive behaviors of energy purchasing at the supply side, we treat each hub as a self-interested agent, and formulate the AEM problem of these hubs as a monotone generalized Nash game (MON-GNG). On one hand, there are global coupling constraints representing the supply limits of the input energy systems, which are imposed by the limited capacities of electrical feeders and natural gas pipelines, thus making it a GNG. On the other hand, the cost function of each hub is merely convex in its actions considering the input-to-output energy transformation inside and the impacts of the energy storage devices, which leads to an MON game. The existence of the generalized Nash equilibria (GNEs) of this MON-GNG can be theoretically guaranteed. Then, by reformulating the MON-GNG as a variational inequality problem with special decomposition structure, an efficient and single-loop distributed algorithm is then proposed for computing a GNE with clear economic interpretation based on an improved Tikhonov regularization technique. Principles of parameter selection that will guarantee convergence are suggested. Numeric simulations validate the convergence performance and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.