Agent-Based Microgrid Scheduling: An ICT Perspective

New Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), such as the Internet of Things (IoT), are enabling the evolution of energy grids towards a sophisticated power network called Smart Grid (SG). In the context of SGs, a microgrid is a self-sustained network that can operate in both grid-connected or stand-along modes. The long-term scheduling of the operation of distributed generators (DG) and renewable energy resources (RES) in microgrids is a problem that requires tough planning and the use of advanced tools to be efficiently addressed. This paper discusses different ICT technologies that can enable microgrid communication for control and management of distributed energy resources (DER). Based on such ICT, we propose a novel agent-based model to address the long-term scheduling of DER in microgrids as a distributed constraint optimization problem (DCOP). However, finding the optimal solution for a DCOP is known to be an NP-Hard problem, making difficult to guarantee optimal solutions even for short optimization periods. Hence, for the long-term scheduling of DER, we propose to split the problem into small time windows that can be effectively solved sequentially by off-the-shelf DCOP algorithms. A particular, but general enough case study is used to compare different DCOP algorithms under the proposed model. Results show that DCOP algorithms can find optimal and near-optimal solutions depending on the window size and the scenario considered.