Abstract

As a result of environmental concerns and technological developments, power systems are gradually transitioning towards a smart grid paradigm, adopting distributed and scalable solutions to deal with rising levels of complexity and uncertainty. A key element of this transition is the increasing diffusion of new flexible loads, such as electric vehicles and “smart” appliances. It has become crucial to properly coordinate these new entities, ensuring safe and reliable system operation and, at the same time, aligning the interest of the individual users with the overall social welfare.

This talk presents novel price-based control strategies to achieve these objectives. On the basis of an aggregative game formulation that considers the loads as rational competing agents, Lyapunov stability tools are used to ensure convergence and optimality of the proposed control schemes, which are based on iterative better-response updates. The state of the art is advanced by extending these results to more general modelling frameworks, explicitly accounting for grid topology, operational constraints, dynamic environments and provision of ancillary services.