An Asynchronous Online Negotiation Mechanism for Real-Time Peer-to-Peer Electricity Markets

Participants in electricity markets are becoming more proactive owing to the fast deployment of distributed energy resources (DERs) and the further development of demand-side management (DSM), which also boosts the emergence of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) market mechanisms. Moreover, the market is also required to operate in a real-time scheme in response to changes in generation and load to maintain power balance. It is highly desirable to propose and analyse novel approaches suitable for real-time P2P market mechanisms. These are challenging since most often involving a heavy computational burden, while the time available for negotiation in real-time is very short. Our core contribution is to design and analyse a novel asynchronous online optimization framework and related real-time P2P market negotiation mechanism, which can greatly reduce the computation and communication burden from two aspects. First, a novel online consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is proposed. It significantly reduces computation since only one iteration is performed for each agent at every time period. Second, the market operates in an asynchronous mode so that all agents can freely trade without waiting for idle or inactive neighboring agents. The sublinear regret upper bound is proved for our asynchronous online algorithm, which indicates that social welfare in the market can be maximized in the long run on average (over time). Simulations show that our algorithm enjoys good convergence performance, robustness, and fairness.