Optimal Prosumer Decision-Making Using Factored MDPs

Tackling the decision-making problem faced by a prosumer (i.e., a producer that is simultaneously a consumer) when selling and buying energy in the emerging smart electricity grid, is of utmost importance for the economic profitability of such a business entity. In this work, we model, for the first time, this problem as a factored Markov Decision Process. By so doing, we are able to represent the problem compactly, and provide an exact optimal solution via dynamic programming— notwithstanding its large size. Our model successfully captures the main aspects of the business decisions of a prosumer corresponding to a community microgrid of any size. Moreover, it includes appropriate sub-models for prosumer production and consumption prediction. Experimental simulations verify the effectiveness of our approach; and show that our exact value iteration solution matches that of a state-of-the-art method for stochastic planning in very large environments, while outperforming it in terms of computation time.