C2C: Community-Based Cooperative Energy Consumption in Smart Grid

In this paper, a community-based cooperative energy consumption scheme in smart grid, which alleviates energy consumption cost to customers, is proposed. The concept of community among customers in the smart grid is discussed. To form different communities among customers, a community-based game among customers is orchestrated, while considering the dynamic nature of the composition of the community. A practical scenario involving multiple customers forming a group and cooperating with one another is considered. The proposed dynamic community formation scheme always achieves an equilibrium state. Furthermore, the proposed scheme also helps to reduce peak-to-average ratio of the energy demands from the customers in different time periods. Simulation results show that the proposed cooperation-based scheme outperforms the existing schemes. It is also shown that customers can minimize their energy consumption cost by approximately 16% using the proposed scheme, compared to noncooperative approaches.