Community Energy Management Incorporating Preferences of Consumers: —Analysis and Design of Control System Including Optimization in the Loop

In this paper, we address a design problem of a community energy management system, in particular a control problem of power consumers. A control system including a large number of consumers is inevitably affected by their decisions, which can cause undesirable behavior or instability of the system. We aim to construct a stable control system that is consistent with consumers’ “preferences”. To this end, we describe the preferences as cost functions to propose a control structure that achieves an optimal allocation of the power consumption. In general, the assumption that the cost functions of all consumers are available for the control system design, is too severe for practical system design and implementation. This paper contributes to find a special class of the cost functions and to propose a cost function-free design of the allocation system. Finally, the usefulness of the proposed allocation system is confirmed through numerical example.