IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 5, NO.
5, SEPTEMBER 2014
Energy Management System for an Energy District
With Demand Response Availability
Giovanni Brusco, Alessandro Burgio, Daniele Menniti, Anna Pinnarelli, and Nicola Sorrentino, Member, IEEE
AbstractDuring recent years the electricity supply chain
(electricity production, consumption, distribution, storage, and
load management) has changed. In this context a new term ap-
pears: the prosumer, that is both a consumer and producer of
energy in the same entity. In the paper, an energy management
approach of several prosumers aggregated in a coalition, the
energy district (ED), and coordinated through a central control
entity, the coalition coordinator, is proposed. The aim of the coali-
tion coordinator is to maximize the coalition utility also reducing
in this way the reverse energy flows at the point of delivery by
an appropriate demand response program. The application on
an Italian residential housing area is illustrated. The numerical
results demonstrate the effectiveness and attractiveness of the
proposed energy management scheme.
Index TermsAggregator, demand response, micro-cogenera-
tion, photovoltaic generation, prosumer, smart-grid.
I. INTRODUCTION
I N recent years the new term prosumer has appeared in
power system terminology: a prosumer is a consumer that,
consequent to the rapid development of technologies and prof-
itable feed-in tariffs of renewable source-based plants, has in-
stalled micro-generation plants, a few kW, to accomplish its en-
ergy requirements and to sell electricity to the market thus also
becoming a producer. The most common technologies used to
produce renewable energy are photovoltaic (PV), wind-turbine,
micro-combined heat and power (CHP) based on biomass. As
a result of this trend, the low-voltage (LV) networks become
active, that is to say, at several periods of the day and so of
the year a reverse energy flow appears at the point of delivery
(POD), generally a MV/LV substation. This causes many prob-
lems in terms of power quality at the end-user and of stability
for the distribution network [1]. These drawbacks can be more
easily addressed through a clustering of prosumers in an energy
district (ED). An ED is an energy consumption and production
Manuscript received July 01, 2013; revised July 18, 2013, November 07,
2013, February 21, 2014; accepted April 05, 2014. Date of current version
September 05, 2014. This work was supported by the Italian Ministero dello
Sviluppo Economico (MISE) and Ministero dellIstruzione, dellUniversit
e della Ricerca (MIUR), financed by the National Operational Programme
for Research and Competitiveness 20072013 under contract PON01_01840
Microperla and Contract PON04A2_E SINERGREENRES NOVAE.
Paper no. TSG-00488-2013.
The authors are with the Department of Mechanical, Energetic, and Man-
agement Engineering, University of Calabria, 87036 Rende (CS), Italy (e-mail:
g.brusco@unical; a.burgio@unical; d.menniti@unical; a.pinnarelli@unical;
n.sorrentino@unical).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSG.2014.2318894
1949-3053 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
2385
center consisting of several interconnected prosumers both from
an electrical point of view and a thermal one. The prosumers be-
longing to the ED are connected to the grid by a unique POD, so
the energy exchange with the electrical system takes place in an
aggregate form. In such a framework, the presence of a coalition
coordinator is fundamental. The aim of the coalition coordinator
is to maximize the ED utility also reducing the reverse energy
flows at the POD in more cases by implementing an appropriate
demand response (DR) program. The DR is a resource that al-
lows the end-users to reduce their electricity consumptions in a
given time period, or shift the usage to another time period in re-
sponse to a price signal, a financial incentive, an environmental
condition and/or a reliability signal. The DR saves money for
ratepayers by lowering peak energy usage which generally cor-
responds to a high-priced level and so lowers the price of whole-
sale energy, and in turn, of the retail rates. It may also prevent
rolling blackouts by offsetting the need for more electricity gen-
eration and mitigate generator market power.
A. State of the Art
There is a large literature on the demand response program
for domestic users [2][8]. Among those, there are papers
on the modeling of specific appliances. For instance, [2]
and [3] consider the electricity load control with thermal mass
in buildings; [4] considers the coordination of charging the
plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) with other electric ap-
pliances. Reference [5] studies the electricity usage for a typical
household and proposes a method for end-user customers for
the scheduling of their available distributed energy resources to
maximize net benefits in a day-ahead market framework. Refer-
ence [6] proposes a residential energy consumption scheduling
model which attempts to achieve a desired tradeoff between
the minimizing of the electricity payment and of the waiting
time for the operation of each appliance in the household in the
presence of a real-time price tariff by price forecasting based
on prior knowledge methods. Reference [7] considers a power
network where end-user customers choose the daily schedules
of their household appliances by playing games among them-
selves and the utility company and try to adopt adequate price
tariffs that differentiate the energy usage in time to reach the
Nash equilibrium by minimizing the energy costs. Reference
[8] considers a centralized complex bid market-clearing mech-
anism where the end-user customers submit price sensitive
bids in the day-ahead market; it does not study the specific
electricity consumption model for the household. In [9] and
[10], an effective three step approach for implementing the
DR program by an aggregator is presented. It consists of the
following steps: the prediction, the planning, and the real-time
2386
control, respectively. First, the energy demand and therefore
the optimization potential for each single prosumer is predicted.
Next, the predictions of the single prosumer are aggregated and
global planning is performed. In the last step, finally, a local
controller, for each single prosumer, schedules the appliances
in real-time, considering the aggregate energy usage profile
of the planning step as an input. In [11], this model is applied
in presence of distribute generation (DG) working as a virtual
power plant (VPP) that must maximize its profit (VPP decides
times at which producers must produce and how much) and in
the same time plans the production and consumption of each
prosumer in order to satisfy the balance between production and
consumption at the local level. Then, an optimization problem
is defined with the objective of determining a trade-off between
the goal of the VPP and the availability of local resources. In
this case, the coordinator model is configured as in other pro-
posals acting at the level of load/generation local modulation.
In this framework, in order to reach the optimum in terms
of energy efficiency the agent based control methodologies
may be the most appropriate ones to implement a hierarchical
architecture in real life applications. Most significant applica-
tions in similar cases may be found in [12][17]. Reference
[12] proposes an agent per device; the agents give their en-
ergy production price (the switching-off of an appliance is
seen as production); it is decided which agents are allowed to
produce via a market principle. The information is aggregated
on different levels in a hierarchical way since there are many
agents. The power matcher described in [13] and [14] also
takes network capacities into account. This methodology is
rather mature; it is a product capable of being used in field
tests [15]. In these field tests, a 30% peak reduction is reached
when a temperature deviation of one degree of the thermostat
is allowed. Furthermore, the authors of [16] compare the
results of individual (local) and overall (global) optimization
approaches. They conclude that global optimizations lead to
better results. Next, they claim that agent based methodologies
outperform non-agent based methodologies since agent based
methodologies take into account more (domestic) information.
B. Contribution of the Paper
The main idea is that, in the proposed hierarchical system,
the traditional aggregator-decider figure, such as that in [9]
and [11] is substituted by a coordinator figure, or rather one
which limits itself to managing the decisions made by each pro-
sumer, stimulating and awarding attitudes responding to price
signals which are sent by the same coordinator. The proposed
scheme is completely decentralized in that each prosumer can
autonomously make decisions based on their requirements
and aims by means of the solution of the prosumer problem.
In particular, the proposed DR program is based on the pro-
sumers attitude to changing their profile in relation to the
renewable energy available quantifying that which it believes
to be necessary to save in order to repay themselves for the
inconvenience caused by rescheduling their own consumption.
Taking into account such a consideration, it is not possible to
carry out a centralized optimization in that the offers of the
single prosumer or rather the quantification of the minimum
saving to be obtained in order to activate the decision cannot
be determined by the coordinator.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 5, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2014
The coordinator acts to send information about the selling
of the energy surplus at an hour (that is, the market electricity
price and energy quantity to sale) and it receives offers from
each prosumer in terms of energy quantity and price available
to purchase by rescheduling its energy consumptions. In this
way, from a decentralized perspective, the coalition coordinator
leaves the decision to participate in the DR program and at
what price to each prosumer. The coalition coordinator, then,
has the role to manage these offers and to choose ones that
maximize the ED utility implementing an auction. The auction
mechanism allows to implicitly take into account the respon-
siveness of the end-user; if it is less reactive, its offer to pur-
chase will be lower and therefore its acceptance unlikely. In-
stead, when global optimization is performed as in [9], the re-
sponsiveness of the consumer, i.e., its attitude to accept home
comfort degradation consequent to global planning, has to be
estimated in order to schedule the load profile. In particular, the
responsiveness evaluation transforms the optimization problem
into a stochastic one with the resulting difficulty in its modeling
and resolution [17].
Using the proposed approach, the DR program also addresses
the problem of energy reverse flow in more cases reducing the
sale and thus the injection of energy to the grid. The proposed
DR program is based on the following very simple hypothesis:
the energy selling price is lower than the purchasing cost. The
difference between the selling price and the purchasing cost
may be due to different reasons also depending on the mode
of energy purchase. First of all, for a conventional supply con-
tract, the purchasing cost for the end user is the sum of the cost
of energy on the market, plus the transport costs, the cost re-
lated to transmission line losses and other costs related to other
charges of the network system. These additional costs may drive
up the energy cost to 50% more; for more detailed information
refer to the Italian Authority tariff [18]. Moreover, in the spe-
cific case of this paper, the ED consumption does not make a
direct purchasing economical due to entry barriers in the elec-
tricity market therefore there is a need to address an interme-
diary (wholesaler). The cost of energy for the ED results as
being higher than the market clearing price due to the whole-
sale gain. Instead, the energy produced and sold to the grid, apart
from any incentives that in recent years have been considerably
reduced, is valued at the market price.
Finally, the proposed DR approach allows handling in the
presence of non-programmable renewable energy plants, that
cannot be modeled in a VPP pattern as in [11]. Of course, the
presence of these types of plants complicates the formulation
of the optimization problem that each prosumer must resolve.
Suitable probabilistic techniques must be adopted to take into
account production uncertainty, such as the well-known Monte
Carlo method used in the paper.
C. Structure of the Paper
First, in the paper, the operation of an ED is fully described.
Then, the optimization problem of the single prosumer and of
the coalition coordinator are illustrated and discussed. Finally,
the proposed energy management scheme with the related DR
program is illustrated and simulated on an ED example cor-
responding to an Italian residential housing area on a typical
winter day.
BRUSCO et al.: ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR AN ED WITH DR AVAILABILITY 2387

II. ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR AN ENERGY DISTRICT

When discussing coordinator types, it is important to iden-
tify a suitable candidate. There are a few alternatives. One al-
ternative is that the coordinator is a new company which only
concentrates on the coalition activities. Another alternative is an
existing market participant which already has relations with the
end-users (that is a retailer). Both alternatives imply different
business models. In the case of a retailer that takes up the role
of the coordinator, the business model, named generally coordi-
nator-retailer model, eliminates the balance calculation proce-
dure because the customer demand coordinator and retailer are
the same entity. Any changes to customer consumption are au-
tomatically included in the retailers balance account. Instead, if
the coordinator is not a retailer, such a balance valuation must be
completed. In this case, the coordinator has to deal with the re-
tailers to which it must report on its balance. Another alternative
is a coordinator acting as an independent third party company,
which has made no agreements about income sharing nor ser-
vice provision with retailers. In this case, the coordinators ac-
count will be directly credited by load regulation of its end-user
customers [19]; the business model corresponds to a consumer
coalition. The idea to aggregate residential, commercial and
small industrial energy consumers was suggested and promoted
by the academy [20], [21] and the government [21] and, rather
than conceptual it is an operational practice in Italy [23]. Such
Fig. 1. ED modus operandi representation.
coalitions are mainly nonprofit organizations [24] that provide
their members with economic advantages by minimizing en-
ergy consumption costs by varying energy usage according to by reshaping/rescheduling the energy usage profile of single
the hourly variations in energy tariffs, with the additional social prosumers, by implementing an appropriate DR program. To
benefit of decreasing the chances of system overload. In [25], achieve this aim the activity of the coordinator, in accordance
the authors propose the way of working of a consumer coalition with the approach proposed in [9] and [10], is characterized by
able to handle DR programs effectively but not in the presence a planning stage, a demand response program on a day-ahead
of distributed generation as considered in this paper. horizon and a real time stage. This last stage is currently under
investigation by the authors.
A. Coordinator Policy and Organization The energy produced by the DG present in the ED is predicted
From a decentralized perspective, the proposed coalition in the planning stage and the tariffs are determined.
structure is hierarchical, with an upper-level player, the coali- Those tariffs are generally TOU tariffs in order to exploit
tion coordinator, operating in the name and interest of the the responsiveness of the coalition members; they are deter-
whole coalition, which is made of lower-level players who are mined considering the procurement cost resulting from the port-
individual members of the coalition. The coalition coordinator folio problem solution, the transport cost, network loss cost and
is regarded as a nonprofit entity, with the main task of procuring the costs related to the power absorbed by the coalition at the
the electrical energy needed by the coalition at the minimum POD. These data are transmitted to each prosumer in order that
cost. To accomplish the aforementioned task, the coalition they may schedule their appliances for the next day solving an
coordinator faces the so-called optimum portfolio problem, optimization problem defined in the paper as the Prosumer
i.e., it must decide how much energy must be purchased problem, sending their energy profiles back to the coalition co-
through long-term contracts and how much must be reserved ordinator. At this point, the coalition coordinator calculates the
for purchases in the day-ahead electricity market (DAEM). A aggregated energy profile summing the aforementioned energy
second issue for the coordinator is to choose the energy rates profiles thus evaluating the available energy surplus. Then, the
for the members of the coalition. It is worthwhile highlighting proposed DR program starts trying to correct the aggregated
that whichever tariffs are applied to coalition members, the energy profile to maximize the coalition utility by solving an
coordinator chooses them, thus acting like a monopolist. In optimization problem defined in the paper as the Coordinator
[25], also, the problem of choosing a rule concerning what price problem. A simple representation of the proposed ED modus
a monopolist should set, in order to maximize social welfare operandi is reported in Fig. 1. The control and communication
subjected to a constraint on profit, was discussed. In the paper, architecture of the ED is reported in Fig. 2. It exploits the two
the aforementioned coalition coordinator is revised in order level control of the proposed ED energy management scheme: at
to take into account the presence of renewable energy source the prosumer level, the local controller provides optimal sched-
plants. The aim is to optimize ED operation, that is, to maxi- uling of the controllable loads taking information coming from
mize ED utility reducing the energy reverse flow in more cases the coalition coordinator into account; at the coalition level, on
2388 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 5, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2014

Fig. 2. ED control and communication architecture.

the basis of local controller planning, the DR program is imple-

mented in order to maximize coalition utility. For implementa-
tion of ED communication architecture it is necessary to have
a local controller for each prosumer that is able to monitor and
to control the loads by changing set-points such as indoor tem-
perature, lighting-timers, and so on, in order to determine the Fig. 3. Data flow of planning stage.
optimal energy usage profile consequent to the price signals
and predicted energy production sent by the coalition coordi- Given the predetermined parameters and , in order
nator. It is the opinion of the authors that this control architec- to provide the required energy for each appliance in times
ture is well suited for an agent based implementation as out- within the interval , it is required that
lined in the introduction of this paper. In the following, first, the
local controller implementing the Prosumer problem and then
the coalition coordinator controller implementing the Coordi- (1)
nator problem are illustrated and discussed.

B. Local Controller Further to the constraint (1), it is expected that for any
and as no operation (thus energy consumption)
The planning stage of Fig. 1 is illustrated in detail in Fig. 3 is needed outside the time frame for appliance . All
highlighting the interactions between the coalition coordinator home appliances have certain maximum power levels denoted
and the local controller of each prosumer. The coalition coor- by , for each . Some appliances may also have min-
dinator, on the basis of the weather condition forecast, sends imum standby power levels , for each . Therefore,
the prediction of the energy production by wind, solar and/or the following lower and upper bound constraints are required
micro-CHP plants and the TOU tariffs to the local prosumer on the choices of the energy scheduling vector for each ap-
controller. The local controller, in order to define the energy use pliance
that minimizes the purchasing costs, takes this information into
account together with user preferences regarding appliance set- (2)
tings (i.e., the time range preferred for dishwasher usage), in-
door temperature and other comfort parameters, and solves the Finally, we note that there is usually a limit on the total en-
Prosumer problem, described in the following subsection. The ergy consumption at each residential unit per hour. This limit,
result of the optimization procedure will then be communicated denoted by , can be set by the utility to impose the fol-
to the coalition coordinator. lowing set of constraints on energy scheduling:
1) Prosumer Problem: Consider a residential unit that can
participate in the DR program. In the following the use of ap- (3)
pliance is indicated for brevity only with the term appliance, so
an appliance may be used more than one in the H-hour. Then,
let denote the set of appliances in this unit which may include When appliances of type off and on (that is appli-
a washer/dryer, a refrigerator, a plug-in hybrid vehicle, etc. For ances with discrete energy consumption levels) exist, for each
each appliance , we define an energy consumption sched- of these appliances and at each hour let denote an
uling vector as follows [6]: auxiliary binary variable such that if appliance a is on
where is the scheduling horizon and otherwise.
that indicates the number of hours ahead which are taken into By definition, the former requires an energy consumption
account for decision making in energy consumption scheduling. level of where as the latter requires an energy con-
For each upcoming hour of the day , sumption level of . Therefore, for each appliance
a real-valued scalar denotes the corresponding one- , the relationship between the energy consumption sched-
hour energy consumption that is scheduled for appliance uling vector and the auxiliary vector
. On the other hand, let denote the total energy needed can be expressed as follows:
for the operation of appliance . Clearly, we always have
. (4)
BRUSCO et al.: ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR AN ED WITH DR AVAILABILITY 2389

Some loads such as PHEV battery charging are interruptible Photovoltaic production
loads. That is, it is possible to charge the battery for one hour,
then stop charging for another hour, and then finish charging
after that. However, if the load is an uninterruptible load, then,
Wind production
when the corresponding appliance starts the operation, its op-
eration must continue until it finishes. This requires imposing
further limitations on the choices of the energy consumption
Stirling-mchp production
scheduling vectors. For each uninterruptible appliance , let
denote the time duration, in number of hours, that appliance
needs to operate at power level . Also at each , let
denote an auxiliary binary variable such that if ap- Photovoltaic and wind production are valuated using the
pliance a starts operating at hour and otherwise. Then, corresponding models illustrated by the authors in [26]. The
we have third one is valuated using the model of a 1-kW pellet stove
micro-CHP WhisperGen Stirling system. The pellet cogener-
(5) ation stove is based on the integration between a WhisperGen
Stirling engine and a pellet stove. The model used to analyze the
engine is a variable pressure, variable temperature, and variable
(6)
volume model [27][29] implemented in the Matlab/Simulink
environment by the authors.
(7) At this point, we can define a feasible scheduling set
for all possible energy consumption scheduling vectors
As described in the previous section, thermostat-controlled and that denotes the vector
appliances are present in the residential unit then we introduce of energy consumption scheduling variables for all appliances.
as energy consumption scheduling vector for this type of An energy schedule is only valid if (1)(8) are satisfied.
appliance for each upcoming hour of the day . Each Clearly, the proper choice of would depend on the TOU
is evaluated by the model of thermostat-controlled appliance tariffs communicated by the coalition coordinator.
in function of the scheduling temperature and the Prosumer Problem
ambient temperature at hour using the function Therm,
that recalls the thermal load model implemented by the authors
in the Matlab Simulink environment [27]. Naturally, a level
of flexibility has been considered and then lower and
upper scheduling temperature limits have been set at
each hour. Then, the following constraint has been introduced:
(10)
(8)

Moreover, a fixed switching price, , of thermal appliance

for a change in power consumption is introduced; therefore, the
variation of thermal energy consumption for the appliance has
been valuated as

(9) Appliances with Discrete Energy Consumption Levels

with the energy consumption for the thermal appliance at
hour corresponding to the desired temperature valuated
by the function Therm.
Therefore, let denote the set of thermal appliances of the Uninterruptible Residential Load
unit, we can define a feasible scheduling set for all possible
energy consumption scheduling vectors
that denote the vector of energy consumption scheduling vari-
ables for all thermal appliances. An energy schedule is valid
only if it satisfies the constraints (8). Since the residential unit
is also a producer, in the Prosumer problem, we must also con-
sider the contribution of renewable source plants production.
With this aim, in the objective function and
quantities have been introduced. These quantities represent the
non-programmable (from photovoltaic, wind plants) and pro- Thermostat-controlled load
grammable (by MCHP) renewable energy production for each
upcoming hour of the day determined by the coalition
coordinator recalling the following specified functions and sent
to each prosumer.
2390
Then, the local controller determines the optimal choice of
energy consumption scheduling vector solving (10).
C. Coordinator Controller
Also in presence of virtuous behavior of a single prosumer
consequent to the TOU tariffs sent by the coalition coordinator,
i.e., power is used when it is produced or when the price is low, a
power excess may appear at some hours when the renewable en-
ergy plants are oversized compared to the local consumer power
demands. In this case, if there is a greater consumer load at the
POD then the surplus energy will be sold to these consumers at
the price previously determined by the coalition coordinator, on
the contrary the surplus energy is injected into the grid, i.e., the
LV network becomes active. An energy reverse flow exists
and it represents a money loss for the ED. It does so as the in-
come due to the selling of the energy is less than the savings that
the ED may obtain if this energy is self-consumed rescheduling
the load profile. The aim of the coalition coordinator is that of
maximizing ED utility and also to reduce energy reverse flow in
more cases by implementing an appropriate DR program. The
basic idea of the proposed DR program is based on the differ-
ence between TOU tariffs and market clearing price (MCP). As
illustrated in the introduction, in any case the TOU tariff (pur-
chasing cost) for ED members at a given hour is higher than the
MCP, (the selling price) at the same hour. Therefore, it can be
convenient for a consumer belonging to the ED to buy the avail-
able energy surplus at a price lower than the TOU tariff, modi-
fying his load profile and for the producer to sell at a higher price
than the MCP. The utility of the ED is increased in the sense that
each ED member can obtain a gain. In practice, a coalition elec-
tricity market can take place. The coalition coordinator plays
the role of the power exchange with a pay as bid rule: it col-
lects the purchasing offers, which are higher when compared to
the MCP, and selects the most convenient one according to a
merit order list. The consumers offering the highest prices will
be selected and their offers accepted. This is implemented by
the following Coordinator Problem.
1) Coordinator Problem:
(11)
where h is the hour when an energy surplus appears; is the
energy surplus (that also represents the possible reverse energy
flow); it is calculated as the difference between the aggregated
energy usage and the aggregated energy production profiles at
hour h; is the related MCP at hour h, respectively; and
are respectively the offered and accepted energy quantity of
the consumer i; is the offered price of the consumer i; n
is the number of consumers making offers in the auction;
represents the ED utility that is the gain in reselling the surplus
of energy inside the ED instead of selling it on the electricity
market; if no feasible solution exists this means that there is no
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 5, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2014
utility for ED, i.e., the price and quantity offered determine an
. It is worth underlining that, generally, the ED distri-
bution network is adequate to support the power flows deter-
mined following the DR program and therefore no congestion
may occur in the distribution network within the ED.
D. ED Energy Management Scheme
The ED energy management scheme above outlined is per-
formed by the following stages in a day-ahead framework by
handling the data on an hourly basis.
First stage: planning
1) Each ED prosumer determines its electrical/thermal energy
usage profile solving the Prosumer problem according to
the TOU tariffs and the predicted energy production profile
sent by the coalition coordinator.
Second Stage: DR program
1) An aggregated day-ahead energy profile of the ED is ob-
tained summing the results of the planning stage for each
prosumer.
2) The hours when an energy surplus (representing a re-
verse energy flow) appears are detected and the related
day-ahead MCPs are taken into consideration;
3) The available energy surplus at each hour with the
related MCP at each hour is published and commu-
nicated to the prosumers;
4) The prosumers make offers to purchase the available sur-
plus energy and the coalition coordinator solves the Coor-
dinator Problem;
5) The accepted power quantities are communi-
cated to each prosumer so that the final aggregated day-
ahead energy profile is determined for the ED.
III. SIMULATION RESULTS
An ED was simulated considering an aggregation of 30 resi-
dential consumers, 20 residential prosumers, 10 small industrial
consumers, and 10 producers. Three different renewable energy
plants were also considered: a 3-kWp PV plant, a 3-kWp wind
turbine and a 1-kWp micro-CHP. Prosumers consumers were
distinguished according to their availability to change their
habits in a flexible or rigid way. A rigid prosumer consumer
sets their local controller parameters in a narrow range, whereas
a flexible one does so in a larger range and with minor con-
straints. Numerous different load/generation scenarios were
simulated in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed
energy management approach, but for the sake of brevity only
the results for a typical winter day are illustrated. The coali-
tion coordinator, according to the ED management approach
outlined in Section II-C, must estimate the production of the
renewable energy plants present in the ED on the basis of the
weather forecast in terms of temperature, irradiation and wind
speed. In the paper this step has been simulated using the Monte
Carlo method starting from real environmental data obtaining
probabilistic production energy profiles.
Considering the appliance settings, the production energy
profiles and the values reported in Table I, the energy pro-
files for a rigid and a flexible prosumer are determined solving
the prosumer problem outlined in Section II-B (see Figs. 4(a)
and (b), respectively). Consequently, the second stage of the
BRUSCO et al.: ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR AN ED WITH DR AVAILABILITY
Fig. 4. Prosumer energy profiles. (a) Rigid. (b) Flexible.
proposed ED energy management scheme, the DR program, is
performed: the aggregated day-ahead energy profile is obtained
by summing the consumption and production energy profiles
sent from each ED prosumer to the coalition coordinator. At
some hours, as reported in Fig. 5, an energy surplus (positive
values) appears, representing an energy reverse flow, i.e.,
energy can be injected into the grid and can be sold on the
electricity market. It is worth highlighting that greater energy
surplus and subsequently energy reverse flow appears at night
time. In Table II, the aforementioned available energy surplus
at each hour, is reported with the MCP, , representing
the basic auction price. At this point each consumer/prosumer
belonging to the ED submits a purchasing offer according
to the general criterion discussed in Section II-A. The offers
made by the individual prosumer can be determined with
different methodologies which allow for the quantifying of
the prosumers attitude towards modifying their load profile.
The methodologies which can be used must either capture
the intentions and attitudes of the prosumer or simply give the
prosumer the possibility of formulating an offer himself. In this
paper the prosumers decision has been modeled as a causal
variable included among the already predefined minimum and
maximum price values reported in Tables I and II. The results,
for the hours of the day in which the competitive auctions take
place, are reported in Table III. In particular, with the
quantity of energy not assigned in the auction is denoted; if this
value is equal to zero all the quantity of energy is assigned,
only a subset or all of the bids have been accepted; whereas a
positive value means that all the bids have been accepted. In the
last row, the utility computed as defined in (10) is reported.
It is worth underlining that, at night time during which load bids
are lower compared to the excess of available energy surplus,
the utility is greatly reduced. Moreover, the ED obtains a
saving, (indicated as , in purchasing energy by auction, as
noticeable in Table IV, in terms of difference between the ED
2391
Fig. 5. Aggregated energy profile without the DR.
Fig. 6. Comparison between the aggregated energy profile without the DR
(continuous line) and with the DR (discontinuous line).
TABLE I
FOR THE DAY UNDER CONSIDERATION
purchasing cost without DR (indicated as and the auction
and the ED purchasing cost when the DR is performed and the
auction takes place (indicated as . In Fig. 6 the aggregated
energy profile with the DR is illustrated in comparison with the
profile without DR. It is evident how the proposed ED energy
management approach, as well as maximizing ED utility, is
able to reduce the night time reverse energy flow and reduce
peak power in daytime hours taking the responsiveness of the
prosumers into account.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, an energy management approach of several pro-
sumers aggregated in an energy district is proposed. The optimal
operation of the energy district is the mandatory task of a coali-
tion coordinator who, taking into account both the variations of
the load conditions and of the weather operating conditions, uses
the proposed demand response program to achieve that task.
The proposed demand response program is designed to max-
imize the energy district utility reducing reverse energy flow at
2392
TABLE II
AND FOR THE DAY UNDER CONSIDERATION
TABLE III
AUCTION RESULTS
TABLE IV
ED SAVINGS
the point of delivery in more cases. From the results reported in
Table IV it is evident that an economic advantage for ED mem-
bers exists. There is no guarantee that by avoiding the reverse
flow at some hours it will not appear at other hours in which
the reverse flow did not exist prior to auction. However, it is
expected that such reverse flow would be lower compared to
the original one. In the worst case it would be equal but, con-
sequent to the adopted procedure the consumer would pay less
than before the DR took place, so a utility for ED does exist. It is
worth highlighting that no benchmark exists for the DR program
therefore it is quite impossible to make a systematic compar-
ison with other techniques. However, a qualitative comparison
with the conventional approach can be made. In particular, as
the proposed approach uses a simple market rule, it is possible to
avoid the complex centralized optimization problem. Moreover,
the managing of consumer responsiveness is implicitly treated
as the electricity price of the DR program is determined by the
consumer himself. As a full decentralized scheme is adopted,
the computing framework is parallel and distributed increasing
the computational efficiency.
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Giovanni Brusco was born in Italy in 1980. He re-
ceived the degree in electronics engineering from the
University of Calabria, Rende, Italy, in 2007 and the
Ph.D. degree in computer and system engineering
from the Electronic, Computer and Systems Science
Department, University of Calabria, in 2013.
His current research interests concern renewable
energy sources, distributed generation, and smart grid
technologies.
control, and smart grid technologies.
Alessandro Burgio was born in Italy in 1973. He
received the degree in management engineering and
the Ph.D. degree in computer and system engineering
from the Electronic, Computer, and Systems Science
Department, University of Calabria, Rende, Italy, in
1999 and 2006, respectively.
His research interests include electrical power
systems, distributed generation, renewable energies,
power electronics and harmonics, FACTS tech-
nology, and electronic ballasts.
2393
Daniele Menniti was born in Italy in 1958. He
received the degree in electrical engineering from
the University of Calabria, Cosenza, Italy, and the
Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the
University of Naples, Naples, Italy, in 1984 and
1989, respectively.
He is an Associate Professor in the Mechanical,
Energetic, and Management Department, University
of Calabria. His current research interests concern
electrical power system analysis, real-time control,
and automation.
Anna Pinnarelli was born in Italy in 1973. She re-
ceived the degree in management engineering from
the University of Calabria, Rende, Italy, in 1998 and
the Ph.D. degree in electrotechnics engineering from
the Electrical Engineering Department, University of
Naples, Naples, Italy, in 2002.
She is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical,
Energetic and Management Department, University
of Calabria, Rende, Italy. Her current research inter-
ests concern FACTS technology, harmonic analysis
and electrical system automation and decentralized
Nicola Sorrentino was born in Italy in 1970. He
received the degree in management engineering and
the Ph.D. degree in computer and system engineering
from the Electronic, Computer, and Systems Science
Department, University of Calabria, Rende, Italy, in
1994 and 1999, respectively.
He is a Researcher in the Mechanical, Ener-
getic, and Management Department, University
of Calabria. His current research interests concern
electrical power systems analysis and control, smart
grid, and the electricity market.