A survey of game theoretic approaches in smart grid

The concept of smart grid to transform the age old power grid into a smart and intelligent electric power distribution system is, currently, a hot research topic. Smart grid offers the merging of electrical power engineering technologies with network communications. Game theory has featured as an interesting technique, adopted by many researchers, to establish effective smart grid communications. The use of game theory, to date, has offered solutions to various decision making problems, ranging from distributed load management to micro storage management in smart grid. Interestingly, different researchers have different objectives or problem scopes for adopting game theory in smart grid. Nevertheless, all the game theoretic approaches for making effective smart grid solutions have a common aspect, namely the Nash equilibrium, arriving at which may lead to an optimal solution to the relevant problem. In this paper, we survey a number of game theory-based applications to solve different problems in smart grid. This survey reveals that game theory can be apparently simple yet become an effective technique to facilitate intelligent decision making in smart grid frameworks.