Enabling Online Scheduling for Multi-Microgrid Systems: An Event-Triggered Approach

This article proposes a flexible event-triggered online scheduling (ETOS) method for residential multi-microgrid (MMG) systems integrating internal scheduling and external energy sharing levels. Our novelties lie in the flexible ETOS framework embedding customized functions and the fair energy sharing mechanism. Unlike time-triggered methods with a holistic controller and complex mechanisms, the presented ETOS framework achieves systematic management of MMG by simulating its real-life dynamics from the perspective of event-triggering. In the internal scheduling level, universal working logics are designed through active “demand response” interactions, which has high scalability and openness in function and makes event customization possible for future use. In the energy sharing level, the concept of energy level is introduced to organize a localized energy sharing, in which the sharing strategies can be decided through stimulation and transition with the advantages of fairness and low complexity. Moreover, we specify detailed function and algorithm for ETOS entities, helping to realize flexible online operation of MMG in a decentralized and natural way. Numerical simulations show that proposed ETOS is economically beneficial, computationally efficient, and is promising to facilitate the online scheduling of a practical real world MMG project.