Ring cellular encode-decode UMDA: simple is effective

The management of today's smart grids is a challenge due to the stochastic nature of renewable energies, the vehicle-to-grid functionalities, the participation of external providers and the bidding in local and external markets. For this reason, the "Competition on Evolutionary Computation in the Energy Domain: Smart Grid Applications" with a framework to test algorithms for these problems is launched each year since 2017. In this paper, a novel algorithm named Ring Cellular Encode-Decode UMDA (RCED-UMDA) is introduced. The experimental results showed that RCED-UMDA achieves better average fitness for both tracks of the 2021 edition of this competition than the previous competition's algorithms.