Distributed energy management for smart grids with an event-triggered communication scheme

This paper is concerned with distributed energy management and control issues of both generators and loads. It aims to maximize the total social welfare that balances generation-side expanses, user-side payments, and transmission line costs. A distributed control strategy with continuous information exchange among neighbors is first proposed. It is shown that this distributed algorithm achieves the global optimal power outputs on generators and the optimal electricity usage on loads asymptotically. To reduce communication resource consumptions, the distributed optimization algorithm is further expanded to incorporate event-triggered communication and control mechanism. In this new algorithm, an event-triggering condition for each generator and each load is employed to determine when its related state information should be sampled and transmitted to its neighbors. Compared with the standard periodic sampling and communication schemes, this new distributed and event-triggered algorithm can significantly reduce communication data flows while achieving the nearly identical control performance to that under continuous data communications. The theoretical results of this paper are validated by using a simulation case study with distributed generators and multiple loads on an IEEE 9-bus system.