Assisted energy management in smart microgrids

Demand response provides utilities with a mechanism to share with end users the stochasticity resulting from the use of renewable sources. Pricing is accordingly used to reflect energy availability, to allocate such a limited resource to those loads that value it most. However, the strictly competitive mechanism can result in service interruption in presence of competing demand. To solve this issue we investigate on the use of forward contracts, i.e., service-level agreements priced to reflect the expectation of future supply and demand curves. Given the limited resources of microgrids, service interruption is an opposite objective to the one of service availability. We firstly design policy-based brokers and identify then a learning broker based on artificial neural networks. We show the latter being progressively minimizing the reimbursement costs and maximizing the overall profit.