Cooperative voltage management by demand resources and fair payoff allocation for distribution systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a socially acceptable framework for the realization of efficient voltage management by cooperation among consumers in electric distribution systems where the frequent voltage variation problem is caused by large amounts of photovoltaic (PV) generation systems. In the proposed framework, the profit maximization problem of the coalition under the constraints to suppress the voltage variations caused by PVs is formulated as a linear programming problem, and the payoff allocation among consumers is provided using a solution concept from cooperative game theory called the core. The proposed method efficiently computes the payoff allocation in the nonempty core to accomplish the cooperative voltage management system. Unlike most related works, this paper employs cooperative game theory to explicitly address incentives for cooperation with the consumers. Although the computation for finding an allocation in the core generally requires a significant amount of time, this paper demonstrates that the allocation can be efficiently calculated by using the dual optimal solution of a formulated linear programming problem. The proposed method is validated by computational experiments on a large-scale distribution system model in which consumers with demand resources (including PVs and controllable loads) are connected.