CAF: A college admissions framework for distributed microgrids in a case study

A College Admissions Framework (CAF) algorithm for allowing distributed microgrids (MG) to decide whether to form disjoint coalitions in terms of electricity trading is established. MGs that have the incentive to cooperate can reduce power loss and increase revenues significantly compared to a noncooperative model where no cooperation among the MGs exist. The quota of a college is pre-determined in the original college admissions problems, while the number of ‘student’ MGs that a ‘college’ MG can accommodate is calculated based on each MG's aggregate power imbalance which is a time-varying variable. We prove that the proposed CAF with varied quotas is stable and converges to a final solution. Further, we analyze the computational complexity of CAF altogether with the state-of-the-art coalition formation game based on merge-and-split and show that the CAF is much less-complex especially when operating with a large number of MGs. The performance of the proposed CAF is shown through computer-based simulation followed by a case study.