Online Energy Storage Management: an Algorithmic Approach

Motivated by the importance of energy storage networks in smart grids, we provide an algorithmic study of the online energy storage management problem in a network setting, the first to the best of our knowledge. Given online power supplies, either entirely renewable supplies or those in combination with traditional supplies, we want to route power from the supplies to demands using storage units subject to a decay factor. Our goal is to maximize the total utility of satisfied demands less the total production cost of routed power. We model renewable supplies with the zero production cost function and traditional supplies with convex production cost functions. For two natural storage unit settings, private and public, we design poly-logarithmic competitive algorithms in the network flow model using the dual fitting and online primal dual methods for convex problems. Furthermore, we show strong hardness results for more general settings of the problem. Our techniques may be of independent interest in other routing and storage management problems. 1998 ACM Subject Classification F.2.2 Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems