Emission-Aware and Cost-Effective Distributed Demand Response System for Extensively Electrified Large Ports

A large part of the electric power demand of commercial ports is particularly flexible. Nowadays, the most significant flexible loads of a commercial port are the refrigerated containers, known as reefers, and the shore-side electric power supplies for ships. Moreover, ports usually have a great potential for local energy generation from renewable energy sources. The real-time control of the numerous port flexible loads is difficult to be achieved with conventional control systems. Multi-agent systems (MAS) have been proved to be very efficient in complex systems and, as it is shown in this paper, they can also be effective for large ports. In this paper, a real-time distributed demand response system using MAS with hierarchical structure is proposed for extensively electrified large ports. The proposed control system ensures real-time limitation of ship emissions, and the reduction of operation cost and fast power variations caused by local wind parks. To achieve the above, the electric power demands of in-port reefers and shore-to-ship power supplies are suitably controlled. A fuzzy-logic-based system is exploited to estimate reefers' desired utilization factor and integrated to the developed MAS. The efficiency of the proposed method is evaluated by detailed simulations of a realistic case study of a large commercial port.