Asynchronous Distributed Control of Biogas Supply and Multienergy Demand

In this paper, we study the coordination between biogas producers who can use the biogas themselves, exchange biogas with their neighbors, or deliver it to the various energy grids, such as the low pressure gas grid or the power grid. These producers are called prosumers. In this setting, gas storage, fuel cells, microcombined heat power systems, and heat buffers are all part of the prosumers' node. We aim to optimize the imbalance, profit, and comfort levels per prosumer, while taking the constraints of the energy grids into account and while allowing prosumers to exchange energy with each other. This results in a two-layer optimization problem formulation. In addition, in practice, the communication between prosumers among each other and with grid operators is done in an asynchronous manner. In this paper, we study the problem of two-layer optimization for biogas prosumers embedded in multiple energy grids, while the (bidirectional) communication between the various partners is done asynchronously. We prove the convergence of the asynchronous coordination algorithm that uses both the inputs and the states. We conduct simulations for the biogas prosumer setting, using realistic data to illustrate the convergence of the algorithm and to study its practical implementation.