User-Aware Game Theoretic Approach for Demand Management

Demand-management programs intend to maintain supply-demand balance and reduce the total energy cost. In this paper, we propose a user-aware demand-management approach that manages residential loads while taking into consideration user preferences. Maximizing users´ savings and comfort can be two contradicting objectives. We identify a trade-off between these two objectives and propose an energy consumption optimization model, as well as a game theoretic approach to take this trade-off into account. User comfort is modeled in a simple yet effective way that considers waiting time, type of appliance, as well as a weight factor to prioritize comfort over savings. The proposed game is based on a modified regret matching procedure and borrows advantages of both centralized and decentralized schemes. Through simulations, we show that the proposed approach is scalable, converges in acceptable times, introduces a very limited amount of overhead in the system, achieves very high cost savings, and preserves users´ preferences. Extensive simulations are used to evaluate the performance of the optimization model and the proposed approach.