PORTO @ Archivio Istituzionale della Ricerca

Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are emerging as a feasible paradigm to allow the deployment of renewable-energy infrastructure, by enhancing the local production and consumption of electricity from renewable energy sources. REC design should not include only economic objectives, but also energy and environmental perspectives. These targets are often contrasting and cannot be optimized simultaneously, thus making the problem multi-objective. Traditional techniques, such as population-based metaheuristic algorithms (e.g., NSGA-II), aim to find an approximation of the Pareto front. Still, the decision-making process requires selecting a single solution, e.g., the one closest to an ideal point (Utopia) where all objectives reach their best value. In this contribution, instead, we apply an approach based on game theory to solve the multi-objective design of RECs. We draw a parallel between the objectives of the optimization problem and the players in a cooperative game. Then, the multi-objective problem is turned into a single-objective one aimed at finding the so-called Nash-bargaining solution, an equilibrium point on the Pareto front with particular symmetry properties. Considering a multifamily building, we apply this technique to the REC design including energy, environmental, and economic objectives. Comparisons with NSGA-II show how the proposed approach can find solutions on the ‘compromise’ area of the Pareto front, while significantly decreasing the number of objective function evaluations required, offering a computationally efficient alternative to traditional methods.

A game theory approach to the multi-objective design of renewable energy communities / Lorenti, Gianmarco; Lazzeroni, Paolo; Repetto, Maurizio. - ELETTRONICO. - (2024), pp. 1-6. (Intervento presentato al convegno 2024 International Conference on Smart Energy Systems and Technologies (SEST) tenutosi a Torino (Italy)) [10.1109/sest61601.2024.10694004].