Profit-based unit commitment with security constraints and fair allocation of cost saving in industrial microgrids

Unit commitment (UC) in industrial microgrids (IMGs) is an important issue which has not received much attention in the literature. IMGs consist of many factories with distributed energy resources (DERs) and electric loads that heavily rely on combined heat and power systems. This study illustrates that UC in an IMG is not solely a profit-based UC or a security constrained UC (SCUC) problem. Therefore a new profit-based SCUC (PB-SCUC) formulation is proposed for IMGs that includes both microgrid (MG) security and factories constraints while utilising the generators waste heat to fulfill thermal requirements. The MG controller will solve the PB-SCUC problem to minimise the final production cost through maximisation of the profit by selling electricity to the upstream network. As each DER and boiler may have an individual owner, an approach based on game theory is also implemented to fairly allocate cost saving among factories participating in the generation process. Detailed simulation results are presented for an IMG consisting of 12 factories and analysed to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.