The Demand-Side Management and Control of Smart Grids Based on Weighted Network Congestion Games

Based on the semi-tensor product of matrices, this article considers the demand-side management and state-flipped control of smart grids. Firstly, the smart grids with single-layer and multi-layer power companies can be modelled by a potential game under some specific conditions. Secondly, in the evolutionary process with single-layer power companies, a state-flipped control is proposed such that the evolutionary game converges to the optimal Nash equilibrium. An algorithm is constructed to reduce the control cost and the flipped node set will be found. Then, the corresponding flipped node subsets can be obtained to make as few evolution steps as possible. Finally, the correctness of the theoretical results is verified by numerical simulations.
Note to Practitioners
—This paper has great practical applications in the demand-side management of smart grids. Considering different loads of each player, we use a weighted network congestion game to model the smart grids. The weights in the game are specific to each player and represent their congestion impact, which is more practical in engineering problems. Then we search for the conditions that this kind of game is a potential game and hence has Nash equilibria. This starting point is different from the existing works. Furthermore, we propose a novel state-flipped control to intervene the game process and make it converge to the optimal objective. Compared with the existing theoretical results, the calculation is more convenient and the Nash equilibrium can be easily found. This paper shows an effective method to solve the demand-side management of smart grids in practice and also provides ideas for other engineering problems in such as resource allocation.