Tackling co-existence and fairness challenges in autonomous Demand Side Management

Abstract

Consider a smart grid system in which every user may or may not choose to participate in Demand Side Management (DSM). This will lead to a general co-existence problem between participant and non-participant users. To gain insights, first, we show that some existing electricity billing mechanisms suffer from severe fairness and co-existence defects. Next, we propose an alternative billing mechanism that can tackle the coexistence and fairness problems by taking into account not only the users' total load, but also the exact shape of their load profiles. Our analytical results provide mild sufficient conditions on the choice of system parameters to assure fairness. Furthermore, our simulation results confirm that the proposed billing mechanism significantly improves the fairness index of the DSM system.

Demand Side Management challenges in smart grid: A review

“…The most important issue of fairness is a concern in some DSM researches [22,23,28,45,54]. In [22] the authors suggest that must-run appliances must always be charged at a fixed rate.…”

“…Users' cost in some algorithms is assumed to be their payment to the electricity provider, e.g., in [24][25][26][27][28]. That is, every user n, specifically his ECS unit solves ,…”

“…In [28,54], a fair billing mechanism is proposed in which users pay based on their flexibility in accepting delay on finishing the work of their shiftable appliances. The authors define a fairness index for assessing the fairness of the proposed algorithm.…”

“…In other words, one of the most important factors to encourage a user to contribute in system programs is fairness in users' electricity payments. The system is fair if the users that have more contribution in the system pay less than others [28].…”

“…Strategic game is used in [24][25][26]28] to model the problem. In this game model, electricity consumers (users) are the game players.…”