Distributed Energy Resource Management: All-Time Resource-Demand Feasibility, Delay-Tolerance, Nonlinearity, and Beyond

In this letter, we propose distributed and networked energy management scenarios to optimize the production and reservation of energy among a set of distributed energy nodes. In other words, the idea is to optimally allocate the generated and reserved powers based on nodes’ local cost gradient information while meeting the demand energy. One main concern is the all-time (or anytime) resource-demand feasibility, implying that at all iterations of the scheduling algorithm, the balance between the produced power and demand plus reserved power must hold. The other concern is to design algorithms to tolerate communication time-delays and changes in the network. Further, one can incorporate possible model nonlinearity in the algorithm to address both inherent (e.g., saturation and quantization) and purposefully-added (e.g., signum-based) nonlinearities in the model. The proposed optimal allocation algorithm addresses all the above concerns, while it benefits from possible features of the distributed (or networked) solutions such as no-single-node-of-failure and distributed information processing. We show both the all-time feasibility of the proposed scheme and its convergence under certain bound on the step-rate using Lyapunov-type proofs.