Non-cooperative game-based multilateral contract transactions in power-heating integrated systems

The distributed trading mechanism has gained substantial popularity in protecting the privacy of the agents and reducing the computation burden. The existing studies focus on the distributed transaction mechanism applied in the power market, but the distributed multilateral transaction in the integrated energy system has not been explored. This paper proposes a novel power-heating multilateral contract transaction mechanism considering spot market prices. A multi-leader multi-follower (MLMF) Stackelberg game model is formulated to describe the multilateral contract transactions between the integrated energy service providers (IESPs) and the load aggregators (LAs). In this model, the IESPs play the role of leaders to select discriminate prices for different LAs while the LAs play the role of followers to determine the energy purchases. The competition among IESPs is formulated as a non-cooperative Nash game, where each stakeholder seeks to maximize its own profit. Then, the existence of the Nash equilibrium is proved. Besides, a distributed algorithm is developed to derive the equilibrium of the proposed hierarchical decision model, through which the optimal strategies for each player can be obtained. Two case studies with different scales demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed contract transaction mechanism and the distributed solution algorithm.