Adaptive electricity scheduling with quality of usage guarantees in microgrids

Microgrid (MG) is a key component for future smart grid (SG) deployment with high potentials. Balancing the supply and demand of energy is one of the most important goals of MG management. In this paper, we explore effective schemes for quality-of-usage (QoU) guarantees for local residents in an MG, under randomness in both electricity supply and demand. The microgrid control center (MGCC) aims to maintain the QoU blocking probability around a target value by serving or blocking QoU requests. The problem is formulated as a queue stability problem by introducing the concept of a QoU blocking virtual queue. The Lyapunov optimization technique is then applied to derive an adaptive QoU algorithm with complexity O(1). Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is an online algorithm since it does not require any future knowledge of the system. The stability of the proposed algorithm is proven, and its performance is evaluated with trace-driven simulations under random QoU requests. The simulation results demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of the proposed algorithm.