Online Energy Management for Smart Communities with Heterogeneous Demands

With the development of renewable energy technology and communication technology in recent years, many residents utilize renewable energy devices in their residences with energy storage systems. However, it is a great challenge to share residents' energy with others in the smart community for minimizing the total cost of all residents. In this paper, we investigate the problem of energy management and task scheduling for a smart community with residential combined heat and power system (resCHP) and renewable energy to pay the least bill. We take heterogeneous task arrival into consideration, which widely exists in the community. We formulate the minimum cost problem of a non-cooperative community as a random non-convex optimization problem with physical constraints. Our objective is to minimize the community timeaverage cost, including the cost of the external grid and natural gas. We adopt the Lyapunov optimization theory to tackle this problem, which needs no future data and has low computational complexity. Furthermore, we design a cooperative renewable energy sharing algorithm based on Sarsa Algorithm. Finally, we present extensive simulations to validate the proposed algorithms by using real trace data.