Stochastic unit commitment in smart grid communications

There is growing interest in renewable energy resources and smart grid. Since most renewable sources are highly intermittent, they can induce significan fluctuation on the supply side of the power grid. On the other hand, the use of smart meters and smart appliances in the smart grid can cause significan uncertainties on the demand side as well. Unit commitment scheduling of power generation systems is an important issue in smart grid communications to coordinate energy demand and generation. In this paper, we study the stochastic unit commitment problem in smart grid communications. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are used for renewable energy resources. The stochastic power demand loads are modeled by a Markov-modulated Poisson process (MMPP). We show that, under reasonable conditions on the smart grid, structural results can be derived for the unit commit problem, which make the solution practically useful. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.