Asynchronous Distributed Energy Management with Co-Operative Agents

The goals of decarbonisation and energy security have led to an increasing deployment of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). Robust Demand-Side Management (DSM) approaches are required for the grid integration of these DERs while avoiding congestion and volatility problems. This paper presents an asynchronous algorithm for energy management which is based on a group of agents in a distributed structure. Agents obtain the global aggregate profile at random times and make improvements to it. Our contribution eliminates the single point-of-failure problem seen in centralised operative structures. The evaluation compares our approach with the Profile Steering (PS) algorithm and the multiple commit version of PS. We use real domestic power profiles from 25 houses and use peak-shaving as objective. The results show that our proposed asynchronous distributed approach is approximately eleven times faster than PS, while delivering similar peak-shaving performance and increased robustness.