Energy exchange management in a prosumer microgrid cluster: a piece of cake

The objective of this paper is to propose a proportional-fair energy exchange framework in a prosumer microgrid system taking into consideration the trading preferences of buyer microgrids. In fact, in a multi-microgrid system, there are potential seller microgrids with energy surplus and buyer microgrids with energy demand. The buyer microgrids may have different and,sometimes, competing trading preferences. The proposed framework ensures that each buyer gets a part of its energy requirement fulfilled from its preferred suppliers. Simultaneously, it incentivizes local energy trading over the central high-cost transactions with the main central grid. To this end, a Knapsack problem inspired approach is first suggested to unravel and fix the optimal market preferences of buyer microgrids. Afterwards, a self-organizing, transparent and anti-greed by design Last Diminisher protocol, which is a procedure of fair Cake-Cutting problem, is used to fairly meet the conflicting energy demand of buyers. The proposed approach is evaluated and validated through simulations. It has been shown that the suggested protocol can achieve an efficient and fair energy allocation among interconnected microgrids while reducing the total energy buying cost compared to other methods used in the literature.