Department Gathering

Online Energy Generation Scheduling for Microgrids

Abstract

Microgrids represent an emerging paradigm of future electric power systems that integrate both distributed and centralized generation. Two recent trends in microgrids are the integration of local renewable energy sources (such as wind farms) and the use of co-generation (i.e., to supply both electricity and heat). However, these trends also bring unprecedented challenges to the design of intelligent control strategies for the microgrids. Traditional generation scheduling paradigms assuming perfect prediction of future electricity supply and demand are no longer applicable to microgrids with unpredictable renewable energy supply and co-generation (that depends on both electricity and heat demand). In this paper, we study online algorithms for the micro-grid generation scheduling problem with intermittent renewable energy sources and co-generation, in order to maximize the cost-savings with local generation. Based on insights from the structure of the offline optimal solution, we propose a class of competitive online algorithms, called CHASE (Competitive Heuristic Algorithm for Scheduling Energy-generation), that track the offline optimal in an online fashion. Under certain settings, we show that CHASE achieves the best competitive ratio (which is at most 3) of all deterministic online algorithms. We also extend our algorithms to intelligently leverage on limited prediction of the future, such as near-term demand or wind forecast. By extensive empirical evaluation using real-world traces, we show that our proposed algorithms can achieve near-offline-optimal performance. In a representative scenario, CHASE leads to around 20% cost savings with no future look-ahead at all, and the cost-savings further increase with limited future look-ahead.

This is a joint work with two talented IE students Lian Lu and Jinlong Tu, a long-term collaborator Chi-Kin Chau (an IE alumnus) in Masdar Institute, and Xiaojun Lin from Purdue University who is spending his sabbatical leave in IE and INC. More information can be found on http://staff.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/~mhchen/projects/chase.microgrids.html

Bio:
Minghua Chen received his B.Eng. and M.S. degrees from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California at Berkeley in 2006. He spent one year visiting Microsoft Research Redmond as a Postdoc Researcher. He joined the Department of Information Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in 2007, where he currently is an Assistant Professor. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School in 2011-2014. He received the Eli Jury award from UC Berkeley in 2007 (presented to a graduate student or recent alumnus for outstanding achievement in the area of Systems, Communications, Control, or Signal Processing), the ICME Best Paper Award in 2009, the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Prize Paper Award in 2009, and the ACM Multimedia Best Paper Award in 2012. His current research interests include smart (micro) grids, energy efficient data centers, distributed and stochastic network optimization and control, multimedia networking, p2p networking, wireless networking, multi-level trust data privacy, network coding and secure network communications.

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