MDSM: Generalized multiagent coordination for demand side management

One key challenge in creating a sustainable society is to make consumer demand adaptive to the supply of electricity. We propose a generalization for the multiagent coordination algorithm for partially-centralized demand side management. In this setting, a central unit buys the electricity for the whole group, while the individual agents make their own demand decisions, based on their private constraints and preferences. While the state-of-the-art algorithm achieves strong guarantees, i.e., efficiency, strict budget balance as well as weak incentive compatibility, the formulation requires a simple supply model with a 2-step increasing threshold price function. In this paper, we propose MDSM, a generalized formulation of the multiagent coordination algorithm and prove that it converges to the optimal solution for all convex piecewise linear cost functions. Further, we perform simulations based on real world consumption data to evaluate the scalability of the algorithm in respect to the number of thresholds. The results indicate that the convergence time of MDSM is not sensitive to the number of thresholds in the cost function. This means, the proposed algorithm could be used for a broader set of distributed scheduling problems.