User-Aware Game Theoretic Approach for Demand Management

Demand-management programs intend to maintain supply-demand balance and reduce the total energy cost. In this paper, we propose a user-aware demand-management approach that manages residential loads while taking into consideration user preferences. Maximizing users' savings and comfort can be two contradicting objectives. We identify a trade-off between these two objectives and propose an energy consumption optimization model, as well as a game theoretic approach to take this trade-off into account. User comfort is modeled in a simple yet effective way that considers waiting time, type of appliance, as well as a weight factor to prioritize comfort over savings. The proposed game is based on a modified regret matching procedure and borrows advantages of both centralized and decentralized schemes. Through simulations, we show that the proposed approach is scalable, converges in acceptable times, introduces a very limited amount of overhead in the system, achieves very high cost savings, and preserves users' preferences. Extensive simulations are used to evaluate the performance of the optimization model and the proposed approach.