Distributed Cross-Community Collaboration for the Cloud-Based Energy Management Service

Customers' participation is a critical factor for integrating the distributed energy resources via demand response and demand-side management programs, especially when customers become prosumers. Incentives need to be delivered by the energy management service to attract prosumers to operate their distributed energy resources and electricity loads grid-friendly actively. The cloud-based energy management service enables virtual trading for customers within the same community to minimize cost and smooth the fluctuation. With the potential fast-growing number of service providers and customers, the needs exist for efficiently collaborating across multiple service providers and customers. This paper proposes the distributed cross-community collaboration (XCC) for the cloud-based energy management service to enable collaboration across multiple communities and service providers. The XCC can efficiently handle large-scale variables and data with various allocated computing resources and is formulated as an alternating direction method of multipliers optimization problem. This paper also introduces a cross-community adjustment to avoid the overwhelmed exchanged data and computations among multiple communities under uncertainty. Performances are evaluated in experiments with the discussions.