Bi-Level Transactive Coordination of Energy Management Systems in a Community

This paper presents a hierarchical coordination scheme for residential customer groups with flexible assets in a community through a transactive energy architecture. The work designs a framework to manage home energy management systems (HEMSs) in a residential group to reduce the grid’s stress by optimizing the aggregated consumption and improving the load factor. Nevertheless, addressing the specific challenges in different layers of the distribution system needs a hierarchical framework to guarantee lower-level (groups) and upper-level (community) objectives. Thus, this paper also develops the HEMSs coordination in a group into a hierarchical one with demand response-enabled electric heaters in a community comprising two residential groups. The presented framework includes two local coordinators at the lower level managing their associated HEMSs and a community coordinator at the upper level handling the community. The functionality of the proposed method has been investigated and compared with dynamic price, independent group coordination, and without applying demand response program cases. The proposed approach can reduce the community’s peak energy consumption by up to 47.5%.