Optimal Scheduling of On/Off Cycles: A Decentralized IoT-Microgrid Approach

The current energy scenario requires actions towards the reduction of energy consumptions and the use of renewable resources. To this end, the energy grid is evolving towards a distributed architecture called Smart Grid (SG). Moreover, new communication paradigms, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), are being applied to the SG providing advanced communication capabilities for management and control. In this context, a microgrid is a self-sustained network that can operate connected to the SG (or in isolation). In such networks, the long-term scheduling of on/off cycles of devices is a problem that has been commonly addressed by centralized approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel IoT-microgrid architecture to model the long-term optimization scheduling problem as a distributed constraint optimization problem (DCOP). We compare different multi-agent DCOP algorithms using different window sizes showing that the proposed architecture can find optimal and near-optimal solutions for a specific case study.