Energies, Vol. 11, Pages 2834: Hierarchical Energy Management for the MultiEnergy Carriers System with Different Interest Bodies (Energies)

Multi-energy carriers system (MECS), in which diverse energy carriers and different energy systems interact together, has drawn the interest of many researchers in recent years. However, the optimal economic operational model of the MECS is a nonlinear, multi-variable, and multi-period problem, of which it is difficult to find the solution because several different energy flows are integrated in the system. To this end, three interest bodies in the MECS were investigated, which included the energy provider, the energy facilitator, and the energy consumer, and a hierarchical optimal economic operation strategy was then presented. A hybrid optimization strategy combining the swarm intelligence algorithm and interior point method was developed taking advantage of the merits of each method. Case studies were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical optimal economic operation strategy, whereby demonstrating that the proposed strategy can achieve rational energy allocation and decrease the energy cost in the MECS compared with traditional energy systems.