An agent mechanism for sharing users’ integrated energy considering contribution rate

Abstract

To make full use of the integrated energy resources of users and make users conveniently participate in the integrated energy market, an agent mechanism design is proposed in this paper. In the mechanism, the integrated energy retailer acts as an aggregator, the users’ integrated energy is agented by the aggregator and users are motivated to share their integrated energy among themselves. Through the integrated energy sharing, lower cost of the alliance composed of aggregator and users can be realized. To achieve fair benefit allocation, a novel index termed as contribution rate is first proposed to evaluate users’ contributions to the integrated energy sharing. Then, asymmetric Nash bargaining theory is adopted to design a fair benefit allocation mechanism. Each user gets the corresponding benefits from the aggregator according to their contribution rates. Considering protecting users’ privacy, a distributed solution with good convergence performance and suitable for many users is proposed based on the alternating direction method of multipliers decomposition technique. It can be seen from the 5-user case that through sharing users’ integrated energy ¥355.6 benefits are created. The contribution rates of user 1 to 5 range from 0.1009 to 0.244. Besides, the benefits received by user 1 to 5 are proportional to their contribution rates. All simulation results presented in this paper demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed agent mechanism design.