Automated Demand Response Framework in ELNs: Decentralized Scheduling and Smart Contract

Blockchain technique, with the novelties of decentralization, smart contract, security and cooperative autonomy, is expected to play great effects on promoting the development of energy local networks (ELNs). This paper presents an automated demand response (ADR) framework for decentralized scheduling and secure peer-to-peer (P2P) trading among energy storage systems in ELNs. Different from most existing works that trade electricity over long distances and through complex meshes, this proposed work performs decentralized and automated demand response through energy sharing of P2P executors. We explore for the first time the benefits of a promising blockchain to conduct the overall ADR framework and increase the P2P trading security. To achieve decentralized scheduling without relying on a central entity, a price-incentive noncooperative game theoretic model is introduced to produce equilibrium solutions for energy storage systems. Moreover, we develop a schedulable ability evaluation system to match trading pairs involving buying and selling nodes. On this basis, a state-machine-driven smart contract mechanism is built to realize P2P trading without reliance on a trusted third party. To illustrate the implementation details of the ADR method, a distributed algorithm is designed. Case studies are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.