Contract-Theoretic Demand Response Management in Smart Grid Systems

The sheer growth of electricity demand and the rising number of electricity-hungry devices have highlighted and elevated the need of addressing the demand response management problem in residential smart grid systems. In this article, a novel contract-theoretic demand response management (DRM) framework in residential smart grid systems is introduced based on the principles of labor economics. The residential households produce and consume electricity, acting as dynamic prosumers. Initially, the prosumers' personal electricity generation and consumption characteristics are captured by introducing the concept of prosumers' types. Then, the prosumers' and the electricity market's profit is depicted in representative utility functions. Based on the labor economics principles, Contract Theory is adopted to design the interactions among the electricity market, which offers personalized rewards to the prosumers in order to buy electricity at an announced price, and the prosumers, who offer their “effort” by paying for the purchased electricity. The contract-theoretic DRM problem is formulated as a maximization problem of the electricity market's utility, while jointly guaranteeing the optimal satisfaction of the prosumers, under the scenarios of complete and incomplete information from the electricity market's perspective regarding knowing or not the prosumers' types, respectively. The corresponding optimization problems are solved following a convex optimization approach and the optimal contracts, i.e., rewards and efforts, are determined. Detailed numerical results obtained via modeling and simulation, highlight the key operation features and superiority of the proposed framework.