Game-Theoretic Energy Consumption Planning at Distribution Level for Future Smart Grid

The prevalent game-theoretic demand-side management methods based on the control of residential smart appliances, and Nash-equilibrium (NE) can be achieved for optimal results. However, commercial customers consume much more energy than residential customers, and seldom work is conducted for academic and commercial buildings with central heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. HVAC system takes up the largest portion of electricity usage in the commercial sector. The control of HVAC system cannot solely aim to minimizing the energy usage, but also need to maintain the comfort in accordance with building schedule. Therefore, the methods for optimizing HVAC systems are divergent from the optimization methodologies for home appliances. In this manuscript, a novel Game-Theoretic methodology is addressed to control the operations of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system (HVAC). The approach can help to reduce peak-load, and save monetary expenditure all year around. We also introduce social cost, which is defined as a combination of the energy expense and the cost of human working productivity reduction, to illustrate advantages of the proposed methodology.