Decentralized Coordination of a Community of Electricity Prosumers via Distributed MILP

In this paper, the decentralized energy management of a community of prosumers is studied. The coordination of the prosumers participating in the community is cast as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) with local and global coupling constraints. A dual decomposition method with a tightening of the coupling constraints is applied to solve the problem in a decentralized way. The resulting tightened problem provides feasibility guarantees for the obtained solutions. A receding horizon approach that exploits the structure of the problem is proposed to divide the problem in subproblems and solve them sequentially. The proposed approach ensures that the tightened problem is feasible under realistic conditions, whereas the existing methods may result in infeasible problems. Moreover, it may reduce the necessary constraint tightening compared to existing methods. Two setups are evaluated for the organizational structure of the community, one with a community coordinator and one without. Moreover, three different structures of the communication graph are analyzed for the setup without a coordinator. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method results in feasible problems that can be solved due to the reduced constraint tightening when other methods are not feasible. In the case of feasible problems, the optimality gap is comparable to that achieved with existing methods and even smaller for communities with a small number of participating prosumers.