A Community-Based Building-to-Building Strategy for Multi-Objective Energy Management of Residential Microgrids

With increasing the efforts towards modernization of residential buildings and changing their functionality towards more proactive players in the networks, energy management systems can be regarded as an important contributing solution. Although several approaches have been developed in the literature for energy scheduling of buildings, the effect of occupants comfort as an objective function on the decision making process and its influence on the energy exchange between dwelling units requires more investigations. This study proposes a multi-objective energy management strategy for a group of active buildings (ABs) that form a residential microgrid (RMG), making a trade-off between operational cost of community and comfort level of its occupants. A building-to-building strategy is developed which benefits from rooftop photovoltaic output to supply the RMG loads. Also, the significance of electric vehicles in helping the community to achieve its techno-economic goals is investigated, taking into account the driving behaviour of users. A mixed integer linear programming model is introduced, benefiting from lower computation time and achieving a global optimal solution. The simulation results show the necessity of considering the cost and comfort simultaneously. Besides, the effect of building collaboration and electric vehicles in achieving the community's goal is observed.