Hierarchical transactive home energy management system groups coordination through multi-level consensus sharing-based distributed ADMM

Abstract

Coordinating residential building groups requires a hierarchical structure in which aggregate objectives and coupled constraints are incorporated into decision-making processes at different layers of the electric distribution system. Failure to handle these matters can raise issues, such as rebound peaks and contingencies. This paper proposes a Hierarchical Transactive Coordination Mechanism (HTCM) capable of dealing with residential consumers’ objectives/constraints and local and grid coordinators’ shared objectives/coupled constraints under a bottom-up strategy. Particularly, the proposed multi-level framework distributes local and grid coordinators’ shared objectives among consumers to flatten the aggregate consumption profile and minimize the aggregate energy cost at each level. The suggested scheme is enhanced by developing two additional operations. A gain-sharing technique is designed to fairly divide the total gain acquired by the grid coordinator across the hierarchy from higher to lower levels, successively. Besides, a coupled constraint-sharing method is devised to link these levels and fulfill the coupled constraints by revising consumers’ decisions. The proposed approach is applied to a society of buildings comprising Home Energy Management System (HEMS) groups with demand response-enabled electric Baseboard Heaters (BHs), and its effectiveness is investigated through different case studies. The results demonstrate that the recommended HTCM is able to improve the society’s aggregate power profile load factor by 89%, from 0.45 up to 0.85, and decreases its overall electricity cost by 6.2%.