Demand side management in a group of Smart Energy Hubs as price anticipators; the game theoretical approach

In recent years, there have been significant developments of applications related to “Energy Hub” and “Smart Grid” concepts. Synergy effect of the coupling between electricity and natural gas infrastructures, and approaching energy systems to the smart grid environment leads us to introduce a new solution. This solution is entitled “Smart Energy Hub” (S. E. Hub). Simply stated, the S. E. Hub models a multicarrier energy system in a smart grid environment. The evolution of the smart grid heavily relies on the utilization and the integration of modern information technologies. Therefore, we suggest that the information technology industry should be involved to facilitate the information management in the smart grid. More specifically, we explore how cloud computing, a next-generation computing paradigm, can serve the information management in the smart grid. In this article, we propose demand side management (DSM) game among a group of S. E. Hubs in the cloud computing framework. The simulation results confirm that the proposed approach can reduce the “peak to average ratio” of the total electricity demand as well as individual energy cost.