Accelerated Distributed Energy Management for Microgrids

This paper considers the optimal energy management for a microgrid. The goal of optimal energy management is to minimize the total generation cost while meeting total demand and satisfying individual generator output limits. To achieve this goal, we develop a distributed algorithm based on the consensus theory and gradient estimation technique. Compared to the existing algorithms with diminishing step-sizes, the proposed algorithm enjoys a faster convergence speed due to the fixed step-size, and thus increases the computation speed, and reduces the computation and communication burden. The proposed distributed algorithm is applicable to both fixed and time-varying directed communication networks. We show that the convergence of the proposed distributed algorithm is achieved if the fixed communication network is strongly connected, or if the time-varying communication network is uniformly jointly strongly connected. Numerical simulation results are used to illustrate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.