Power Management Method for Large Ports With Multi-Agent Systems

Full electrification and intelligent energy networks compose a very promising solution for the improvement of the efficiency of large ports. Ports comprise a large number of flexible electric loads like refrigerated containers, electric vehicles, electric shore power supplies to ships at berth etc. Smart grids can provide efficient solutions to maximize the flexibility of port power demand and increase at the same time the efficiency of the port power system. In this paper, it is shown that the model of a large port comprises a very large number of decision variables and constraints. Therefore, port operation optimization becomes extremely difficult with conventional methods. The main goal of this paper is to propose an innovative power management method based on multi-agent systems that achieves the above targets. To the best of the authors' knowledge this problem has not been tackled so far. The proposed method is applied to a realistic case study of a large port comprising thousands of flexible loads and evaluated by detailed simulations.