Achieving cost minimization and fairness in multi-supplier smart grid environment

In this paper, we study the energy management techniques in the smart grid with multiple energy providers. We seek to minimize the electricity cost. In this paper, the desired objectives are achieved through scheduling of different consumers to different utilities at different time slots. We consider a practical system where multiple users can be allocated to a single utility, but, a user cannot be assigned to more than one utility. As a first goal, we formulate a sum cost minimization problem subject to independent generation capacity of each utility. A dual decomposition approach is exploited to find an efficient solution where the sub-gradient approach is adopted to update the dual variables. Later, a min-max based optimization framework is adopted to achieve the fairness among different customers. Moreover, suboptimal schemes are also designed to reduce the computational complexity. Simulation results are presented to validate the performance of the proposed solutions.