Coordination of Electricity and Natural Gas Systems: An Incentive-Compatible Mutual Trust Solution

The coordination of electricity and natural gas systems has attracted increasing attention in recent years. This paper studies the coordinated dispatch of the two systems from a multi-agent perspective. First, our study demonstrates that the coordinated dispatch may lead to a lower payoff obtained by the power system, while the total utility of the two systems increases. For this issue, a transfer payment strategy that redistributes the total payoff to realize incentive compatibility is proposed. To extend its calculation to an incomplete information scenario considering the multi-agent premise, a two-stage algorithm is developed to solve the coordinated dispatch problem and calculate the transfer payment in a decentralized manner. In this algorithm, an anti-cheating mechanism is integrated to ensure mutual trust of the two systems. The numerical test results of two cases confirm the issue of power systems that lack economic incentives in coordination without a transfer payment and further validate the proposed incentive-compatible mutual trust mechanism.