A study of microgrids through cooperative games including the effect of geographical proximity

Given the growing demand for energy and the diversification of its sources, electric utilities have seen the need to incorporate distributed generation in their systems in order to minimize energy losses and raise quality indicators. In this context, it is important to have mathematical tools to assist the management of energy exchange between all players in an electrical system (customers, generators, and “prosumers”). The theory of cooperative games offers tools that are able to model the exchange among coalitions formed by elements of a system. Specifically, we adopt an existing algorithm that simulates the exchange of energy between microgrids as a cooperative game. In order to avoid the consideration of unrealistic coalition formation scenarios, we modify this algorithm by including the effect of geographical proximity. The resulting strategy was implemented in MatLab and was applied to a simple case study. Both the effect of including this restriction on the reduction of losses and the impossibility of forming the so-called grand coalition are analyzed.