The potential of end-users to modify their consumption pattern makes them an interesting resource for providing energy flexibility in energy communities. Thus, active end-users require sufficient incentives and automated trading and management schemes. In order to enable increased small-scale endusers participation for flexibility service provision, a new design for flexibility trading is required to model the behavior of different agents and their interactions in energy communities. The novelty of our work lies in proposing an iterative game-based approach in which all agents -consisting of the distribution system operator (DSO), aggregators, and customers-can determine their decision variables to optimize their own objective functions and interact with others to modify their decisions according to others' decisions. In addition, three scenarios are considered to study the effects of agents' freedom while setting their decision variables (by removing one of their constraints in their corresponding decision-making problem). Moreover, the impact of the presence of interruptible loads in comparison with shiftable loads is investigated in this paper. According to the simulation results, it is found that in the scenario where end-users have fewer constraints, in presence of interruptible loads, end-users gain greater income compared to the absence of interruptible loads.INDEX TERMS Aggregators, energy community, flexibility management, game-based approach, local energy trading.
A new configuration is required to model the behavior of customers, aggregators, the distribution system operator (DSO), and their interactions due to the active participation of customers in the local flexibility market. To this end, we propose a two-layer game-based framework that models agents' behavior and their interactions. Thus, firstly, at the inner layer, customers and aggregators set their decision variables considering the decisions of each other performing an iterative game. After the inner layer game concludes, in the outer layer, the DSO determines its decision variable according to the decision of aggregators and customers. If the convergence condition is satisfied, the game of the outer layer concludes. Otherwise, there is another inner game and subsequent outer game until the satisfaction of convergence condition. Therefor, customers, aggregators, and the DSO have similar decision-making power. Since all of This article has been accepted for publication in IEEE Access.
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