Energy Management in Smart Cities: Leveraging Social Personality Traits

Abstract

Microgrids represent a viable approach for supplying energy at an optimised cost. In residential microgrids, neighbours with different personality traits can collaborate in diverse manners. Further, diverse decision-making among neighbours with varying personality traits can influence their collaborative efforts. This paper investigates how neighbours with diverse personality traits collaborate in residential microgrids as a part of a smart city, facilitating energy sharing and cost optimisation in energy supply. The proposed approach in this paper incorporates social behaviour uncertainties into the model and organises cooperation within a game-theoretic framework. This framework seeks to optimise and equitably distribute energy among neighbours while minimising costs, incentivising cooperation and penalising noncooperation based on individual behavioural traits. Furthermore, the proposed approach is implemented in a residential test microgrid using the GAMS CPLEX solver, analysing two distinct scenarios that account for the influence of energy storage on energy transactions. The proposed method establishes average discount and punishment coefficients, enhancing its adaptability to various microgrid configurations. The study also investigates the tradeoff between utility-set energy prices and optimal pricing for neighbours. Simulations show that cooperation enables neighbours to meet excess demand, reducing overall microgrid costs by up to 80%.