Distributed Energy Trading and Scheduling Among Microgrids via Multiagent Reinforcement Learning.

Abstract

Renewable energy technologies empower microgrids to generate electricity to supply themselves and trade with others. Under this paradigm, microgrids have become autonomous entities that must intelligently determine their policies for energy trading and scheduling. Many factors influence a microgrid's decision-making, such as the complex microgrid infrastructure, the uncertain energy yield and demand, and the competition among the energy market players. These factors are usually hard to precisely model, and deriving the optimal policy for a microgrid is challenging. We propose a multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach with an attention mechanism to learn the optimal policies for the microgrids without complex system modeling. We model each microgrid as an autonomous agent, which learns how to schedule energy resources and trade with others by collaborating with other agents. We adopt attention mechanism to enable intelligently selecting contextual information for the training of each agent. After training, an agent can make control decisions using only its local information, which can well preserve the microgrids' privacy and reduce the communication overhead among microgrids to facilitate distributed control. We implement a simulation environment and evaluate the performances of our proposed method using real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our method can significantly reduce the cost of the microgrids compared with the baseline methods.