A novel stable grand coalition for transactive multi-energy management in an integrated energy system

This paper focuses on the transactive multi-energy management in an integrated energy system which connects multiple multi-energy microgrids (MEMs). To harness the flexibility of MEMs and to induce their coordination, we propose a cooperative game model considering the implementation of the utility-based integrated demand response. The proposed game model is rigorously proved to satisfy the properties of super-additivity and balancedness, which implies that the MEMs are motivated to form a stable grand coalition. To fairly allocate the social welfare generated by the grand coalition, a nucleolus-based allocation scheme is employed. Since computing the nucleolus traditionally involves an exponentially large number of nested programs is challenging, a novel nested primal–dual algorithm, which can reduce the number of programs needed to be solved to no more than the number of MEMs, is thus designed to efficiently calculate the nucleolus. The results of case studies indicate that the proposed model efficiently increases the social welfare of the system, the proposed nucleolus-based scheme fairly allocates the welfare in a stable way, and the designed algorithm shows better performance on iterations and scalability.