Distributed Energy Trading and Scheduling among Microgrids via Multiagent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: The development of renewable energy generation empowers microgrids to generate electricity to supply itself and to trade the surplus on energy markets. To minimize the overall cost, a microgrid must determine how to schedule its energy resources and electrical loads and how to trade with others. The control decisions are influenced by various factors, such as energy storage, renewable energy yield, electrical load, and competition from other microgrids. Making the optimal control decision is challenging, due to the complexity of the interconnected microgrids, the uncertainty of renewable energy generation and consumption, and the interplay among microgrids. The previous works mainly adopted the modeling-based approaches for deriving the control decision, yet they relied on the precise information of future system dynamics, which can be hard to obtain in a complex environment. This work provides a new perspective of obtaining the optimal control policy for distributed energy trading and scheduling by directly interacting with the environment, and proposes a multiagent deep reinforcement learning approach for learning the optimal control policy. Each microgrid is modeled as an agent, and different agents learn collaboratively for maximizing their rewards. The agent of each microgrid can make the local scheduling decision without knowing others' information, which can well maintain the autonomy of each microgrid. We evaluate the performances of our proposed method using real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our method can significantly reduce the cost of the microgrids compared with the baseline methods.