A Privacy-Preserving Energy Management System for Cooperative Multi-Microgrid Networks

This paper presents an Energy Management System (EMS) that considers power exchanges between a set of interconnected microgrids (MGs) and the main grid, in the context of Multi-MG (MMG) systems. The model is first formulated as a centralized optimization problem, which is then decomposed into subproblems corresponding to each MG, using Lagrangian relaxation, and solved through a distributed approach using a subgradient method. The proposed model determines the power exchanges minimizing the operation cost of each MG, considering grid constraints and preserving the privacy of each MG by not revealing their generation cost and demand information. The distributed approach is validated with respect to the centralized problem, and various case studies are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach, comparing the costs of the MGs operating individually and cooperatively. The results show that all MGs in the MMG system improve their cost as consequence of the power exchanges, thus demonstrating the advantages of interconnecting MGs.