Transportation and Power Grid in Smart Cities

13 Cooperative Energy Management in Microgrids

Ioannis Zenginis¹, John Vardakas¹, Prodromos‐Vasileios Mekikis² and Christos Verikoukis³

¹ Iquadrat Informatica, Barcelona, Spain

² Department of Informatics and Telecommunication, University of Athens, Athens, Greece

³ Telecommunications Technological Centre of Catalonia (CTTC/CERCA), Barcelona, Spain

13.1 Introduction

In the last decade, we have witnessed a significant reduction of the cost of renewable energy sources (RES) and energy storage systems (ESS), and so, these systems can be considered as a viable solution for high‐efficiency off‐grid energy systems (Wu et al., 2015). This environment stimulates the development of cost‐effective and environment‐friendly microgrids, as key building blocks of the future smart grid (Kyriakarakos et al., 2012). However, several technical challenges in control, management and operation of microgrids are posed by their implementation, which can be met by employing efficient energy management systems that are able to ensure an economical, reliable, and secure operation of microgrids, as well as to save energy especially during peak‐demand periods (Olivares et al., 2014).

Several approaches for an energy management system have been proposed in the literature that target to plan, operate, and manage microgrids in an efficient way. A number of these approaches refer to the optimal allocation of the load in a single household; the interested reader may refer to Erdinc et al. (2015 ...