Edge Computing Parallel Approach for Efficient Energy Sharing in a Prosumer Community

Luigi Scarcello, Andrea Giordano and Carlo Mastroianni
Additional contact information
Luigi Scarcello: ICAR-CNR, Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking Via P. Bucci 8/9C, 87036 Rende, Italy
Andrea Giordano: ICAR-CNR, Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking Via P. Bucci 8/9C, 87036 Rende, Italy
Carlo Mastroianni: ICAR-CNR, Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking Via P. Bucci 8/9C, 87036 Rende, Italy

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 13, 1-24

Abstract: The transition towards more sustainable energy management can be supported by the diffusion of energy communities, i.e., coalitions of prosumers that are willing to exchange the energy produced locally. The optimization of energy management requires the solution of a prosumer problem that can become impractical when the number of users increases. This paper presents a parallel approach, based on an edge computing architecture, which is suitable for large communities. The users are partitioned into groups whose proportions, in terms of producers and consumers, mirror the composition of the whole community. The prosumer problems for the different groups are first solved separately and in parallel by local edge nodes. Then, the solutions are combined by a central entity to redistribute the energy among the groups and minimize the exchange of energy with the external grid. A set of experiments show that the parallel approach, when compared with an approach that solves the optimization problem in a single stage, leads to a notable reduction of computing resources, and becomes feasible in large communities for which the single-stage approach is impossible. Moreover, the achieved solution is close to the optimal solution in terms of energy costs.

Keywords: energy communities; parallel computing; edge computing; renewable energy sources; energy sharing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/13/4543/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/13/4543/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:15:y:2022:i:13:p:4543-:d:844455

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().