Tackling Co-existence and Fairness Challenges in Autonomous Demand Side Management

Consider a smart grid system in which every user may or may not choose to participate in Demand Side Management (DSM). This will lead to a general co-existence problem between participant and non-participant users. To gain insights, first, we show that some existing electricity billing mechanisms suffer from severe fairness and co-existence defects. Next, we propose an alternative billing mechanism that can tackle the coexistence and fairness problems by taking into account not only the users' total load, but also the exact shape of their load profiles. Our analytical results provide mild sufficient conditions on the choice of system parameters to assure fairness. Furthermore, our simulation results confirm that the proposed billing mechanism significantly improves the fairness index of the DSM system.