Demand Response Management With Multiple Utility Companies: A Two-Level Game Approach

Demand Response Management (DRM) is a key component of the future smart grid that helps to reduce power peak load and variation. Different from most existing studies that focus on the scenario with a single utility company, this paper studies DRM with multiple utility companies. First, the interaction between utility companies and residential users is modeled as a two-level game. That is, the competition among the utility companies is formulated as a non-cooperative game, while the interaction among the residential users is formulated as an evolutionary game. Then, we prove that the proposed strategies are able to make both games converge to their own equilibrium. In addtion, the strategies for the utility companies and the residential users are implemented by distributed algorithms. Illustrative examples show that the proposed scheme is able to significantly reduce peak load and demand variation.