Decentralized Coordination of Multiple Buildings With Renewable Energy Resource and Electric Vehicles

With the popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable energy sources (RES), the flexibility of charging and discharging of EVs and the intermittency of RES have brought challenges to building operations. Considering the mobility of EVs as commuting tools between buildings and the uncertainty of RES, it is of great practical significance to coordinate multiple buildings with RES and EVs on the premise of meeting the state of energy (SOE) requirements of the future trip. We formulate this coordination problem as a stochastic centralized mixed integer linear programming problem. A polyhedral convex set is constructed to describe the SOE uncertainty of EVs. New nonanticipative constraints (NCs) are derived through forward recursion based on constructed scenarios to guarantee the all-scenario-feasibility (ASF) and nonanticipativity of the decision. A Lagrangian relaxation-based decentralized all-scenario-feasible (LR-DASF) algorithm is developed to solve the centralized optimization problem in a decomposition and coordination way. In this method, the optimal ASF solution can be obtained with a fast convergence rate by updating Lagrangian multipliers without solving all subproblems with NCs. The performance of the LR-DASF algorithm is verified by numerical results, which shows that the algorithm can guarantee the ASF of the solution, as well as promote computational efficiency. Note to Practitioners—EVs as energy storage devices bring energy exchanges between buildings accompanying the mobility of EVs which is an opportunity to improve the energy efficiency of multiple buildings. However, as commuting tools, the SOE of EVs must be guaranteed to be larger than the trip requirement over the randomness of RES generation. Furthermore, solving the coordinated optimization problem of multiple buildings with RES and EVs still faces computational complexity challenge due to the spatio-temperal coupling between EVs and buildings, which may lead to costly computational effort in the premise of guaranteeing the feasibility and nonanticipativity of the decision over the uncertainties in practice. Therefore, in order to overcome the above challenges, an LR-DASF algorithm is developed in this paper to solve the coordinated optimization problem of multiple buildings with RES and EVs. Based on the algorithm, for the system operator, it updates and broadcasts the Lagrangian multipliers information to the local coordinators of buildings. For each building, the local coordinator can make ASF decisions based on new NCs with the information obtained from the system operator independently to guarantee the SOE requirement. The method developed in this paper can make faster optimal decisions without perceivable degradation in accuracy and guarantee the SOE requirement of EVs simultaneously, to meet the requirements of feasibility and computational efficiency of decision making in practice. It is conducive to the future application of LR-DASF in the coordinated optimization of buildings and EVs at the city or regional scale.