An Optimal Time-of-Use Pricing for Incremental Distribution Network: A Multi-agent Evolutionary Game Theory-Based Approach

As the construction process of incremental distribution network has been accelerated and the traditional distribution network planning method integrated with large power grid is no longer applicable recently. For incremental distribution network development, how to coordinate the interests among multi-agent in market and then improve the overall operation efficiency has become a problem urgently to be solved. In this study, an optimal time-of-use pricing for incremental distribution network is proposed by formulating an evolutionary game theoretic model, which is applied to a multi-agent system composed of incremental distribution company agent and different types of consumer agents. In the proposed model, the optimization problems for profit/utility change of incremental distribution company and consumers are modeled via game theory and backward induction method is used to obtain the Nash equilibrium. Seasonal time-of-use pricing strategy is implemented and case studies are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The case results demonstrate that the proposed time-of-use pricing can effectively improve the system economic performance, which indicates its promising application value for incremental distribution network development.