Game-theoretic demand side management of a neighbourhood of smart homes with real and virtual energy storage

Demand side management strategies are used in many application scenarios in order to mitigate high peak demands and reduce them to comply with the availability of electricity, which has many implications such as, e.g., costs minimization and efficiency increase, among the others. In this paper, we present a game-theoretic approach for the demand side management of a neighbourhood of smart homes with real and virtual energy storage, where the neighborhood interacts with the energy retailer by means of a local coordinator. We model the strategic interaction among the smart homes as a non-cooperative aggregative game, so as to save communication bandwidth, computational burden and preserve data privacy. The key highlights of the study are: non-simultaneous charging and discharging of the battery using relaxed convex formulation and reduction in the peak-to-average ratio using game-theoretic DSM modelling.