Scheduling of integrated biogas energy system for rural areas using improved differential evolutionary algorithm

Due to lack of rational system design, an enormous amount of energy and resources are wasted or ineffectively utilized in China’s rural areas. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a practical energy system that applies to rural areas. In this paper, a Stackelberg game model is established for optimization of integrated energy system (IES) in rural areas. As a leader, new energy supplier (NES) develops price strategy for electricity and heat, the flexible users and biogas plant (BP) as followers receive price information and make energy consumption plans. Then NES adjusts equipment output based on followers’ feedback on energy loads. The objective of our Stackelberg game is to maximize the profit of NES while taking into account the costs of followers. Furthermore, our study designs an improved differential evolutionary algorithm (DEA) to achieve Stackelberg balance. The optimization scheduling result shows that the proposed model can obviously increase the profit of NES by 5.4% and effectively decrease the cost of biogas plant by 4.5%.