Multi-objective control strategy for energy management of grid-connected heterogeneous microgrids

The demand-side energy management of microgrids comprising of buildings of heterogeneous nature (residential, commercial, industrial, etc.) and thus exhibiting heterogeneous occupancy pattern, requires the development of appropriate energy management systems (EMSs) that can integrate the maximum exploitation of the distributed energy resources like photovoltaic panels with the thermal comfort of the occupants. This paper presents a simulation-based optimization approach for the design of an EMS in grid-connected photovoltaic-equipped microgrids with heterogeneous buildings and occupancy schedules. The EMS optimizes a multi-objective criterion that takes into account both the energy cost and the thermal comfort of the aggregate microgrid. A three-building microgrid test case is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach: comparisons with alternative rule-based and optimization-based EMSs show that the proposed EMS strategy exploits the occupancy information to automatically change the energy demand of each building, resulting in improved energy cost and thermal comfort.