Coordination for Prosumers' Electricity Trading Agents via Distributed Optimization

In this paper, the coordinated operation of agents representing residential household energy management systems in the electricity market is considered. Each agent has its local decision vector that may contain both continuous and discrete variables. The problem of minimizing the energy procurement cost of the community of agents is represented by a Mixed Integer Linear Program with local and global constraints. A dual decomposition method with a tightening of the global constraint is applied to solve the problem with guarantees for the feasibility of the obtained solutions. The problem is decomposed and solved in a distributed way with coordination by a community coordinator. The method is applied to a realistic case study of 15 households.