Scheduling of Wireless Metering for Power

Market Pricing in Smart Grid

Presenter: Mi Wen
Email: mi.wen@uwaterloo.ca

Time: Oct. 24, 2012

Husheng Li, Lifeng Lai, and Robert Caiming Qiu. "Scheduling of Wireless Metering for
Power Market Pricing in Smart Grid". IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID.
2012 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC),
Outline

Introduction
1
3

2 System Model

Scheduling Algorithm
3

4 Numerical Simulation

Conclusion
5
3

2
 Smart Metering

 The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007[1] (EISA, 能

源独立和安全法案 ) defines the smart grid as “a modernization of
the Nation’s electricity transmission and distribution system to
maintain a reliable and secure electricity infrastructure that can
meet future demand growth”---key step: adding intelligence.

Smart Metering

 EISA defined: “The full measurement and collection system that

includes meters at the customer site; communication networks
between the customer and service provider, such as an electric,
gas, or water utility; and data reception and management systems
that make the information available to the service provider”

[1] ISO New England Inc., “Overview of the smart grid: Policies, initiatives
and needs,” Feb. 17, 2009.. 3
Example of smart metering system

Fig. 1. An illustration of the power system within a bus

range. 4
 Problems

Focus on the scheduling policy in the MAC layer of

wireless smart meter networks.
Challenges:
 Huge number of smart meters. scheduling is very important due
to the large traffic and limited bandwidth.
 Time requirement for the data transmission is very high since the
power grid is a highly dynamic system. Delay could incur
instability to the power market.
 Scheduling must take the characteristics of the power systems
into account. Traditional algorithms maximize the throughput or
minimize the average delay may not be valid in smart grid.

5
 Research Objective

Introduce the impact of power market mechanism like

locational marginal price, as well as a simple model of
power load variation, based on which we will study the
scheduling algorithm.

6
 Related Work-- Scheduling Issues

For the purpose of pure data communication like file downloading:

 For elastic traffics, scheduling is used to improve the throughput.
 For delay sensitive data traffics, the deadline based scheduling
algorithm has been extensively studied.
Sensor switching problem for control networks
It is studied how to schedule the sensors in order to estimate the system
state or stabilize the system.
Power market have been studied for the operation of power grid.
 the locational marginal price of power
 the prediction of power system load.
 the impact of pricing signal delay on the power market stability has
been analyzed in [22], based on the model of power market dynamics.
But, the delay is assumed to be a constant and does not concern the
details of networking

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Outline

Introduction
1
3

2 System Model

Scheduling Algorithm
3

4 Numerical Simulation

Conclusion
5
3

8
 System Model(1-1)

Includes the models for the power pricing, networking and power load
variation.
1) Locational Marginal Price (LMP) in Power System

Maximal power Fnmax

Generation shift factor GSFn->k

Bus 1
Line 1
Bus 2
…… Line K Total load Dn
generatior
Bus n
user n1 …… user nJ

Unit cost of power generation Cn

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 System Model (1-2)

The fundamental goal of power grid operation is to match the generation

and load using the minimal total cost within the constrains transmission
line limit.
Power scheduling in the power grid can be casted as the following
constrained optimization problem:

is the power demands in different buses, is collected via the smart

metering infrastructure. 10
 System Model (1-3)

The

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 System Model (2-1)

2) Networking Infrastructure
 consider a single cell communication infrastructure for each bus
range in the power system. We assume that wireless network is
used for the smart meter networks : WiMAX or LTE.
 Renewable energy generations make the power system more
dynamical. scheduling becomes critical when the number of power
users is large, since an AP may not be able to collect the data of
all users.
 (1) Wireless AP: one AP in each bus range, located at the
substation. Collect the information of each smart meter and
broadcast the current power price to all smart meters.
 (2) Smart Meters : smart meter is equipped with a wireless
transceiver, which can exchange information with the AP. the
probability that the transmission of smart meter successds.
J time slots, Tm time slots, scheduling is stochastic
smart meters within the same bus range report to AP one by one. 12
 System Model (2-2)

3) Load Variation
 Power load at each power user could be dependent on the current
power price and the local utility function of power consumption.
is a random parameter
New model:
of the utility function

is the locational power price,

, user maximizes the reward:

with two states:

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Outline

Introduction
1
3

2 System Model

Scheduling Algorithm
3

4 Numerical Simulation

Conclusion
5
3

14
Scheduling Algorithm
Study the optimal scheduling algorithm based on the
Markov decision process (MDP).
1 Elements of MDP

2 Optimal Strategy

3 Myopic Strategy

4 Special Case

5 Performance Bound

First introduce the optimal scheduling strategy.

Then, we simplify it to a myopic policy due to the curse of
dimensions.

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 Scheduling Algorithm

1 Elements of MDP
Decision maker: the substations can be considered as a
centralized decision maker.
System state: the MDP is partially observable. The local state
of each smart meter: ,
If smart

,the system state

with the partial observation is given by:

State Transition:
The local state of smart meter nj turns

From to with probability

: transmission success probabilities. If smart meter is not

scheduled, its local state becomes 16
 Scheduling Algorithm

1 Elements of MDP

Action Space: In each time slot, the decision maker chooses one
smart meter from each bus to report the load .
The action taken at time slot is denoted as

stands for the smart meter scheduled at bus n in

the t-th time slot.

Cost: consider the discrepancy between the true price P and

the estimated price . Then, the cost function is :

P=

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 Scheduling Algorithm

2 Optimal Strategy

The optimal strategy for the scheduling can be solved by applying

dynamic programming (DP).
Denote cost-to-go function by

C(r) is the expected cost at time slot r, E is with respect to the

randomness of power market and price.

When set the cost-to-go function to be zero.

The optimal strategy is characterized by the Bellman’s equation:

By solving the Bellman’s equation, can obtain the minimal

expected cost, and the optimal actions. 18
 Scheduling Algorithm

3 Myopic Strategy

When the number of power users is large, it is impossible to

solve the Bellman’s equation. Thus, simplify the scheduling alg..
The scheduler only optimizes the current cost and does not
consider the future state transition.
The myopic strategy minimizes the expected discrepancy of
the current price..

means “the more precise the load information is, the less error
the price has.”
 myopic scheduling strategy: the smart meter which has the
largest expected change of power load in the corresponding bus
will be scheduled. is the previous power load report of meter n j
 the expected change of power load, as a metric, is given

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 Scheduling Algorithm

4 Special Case

The proposed myopic scheduling strategy may not optimize the

instantaneous reward.
Special Case:

The myopic scheduling algorithm can optimize the sum of costs

when there are no more than two smart meters in each bus.
( proof in Appendix A).

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 Scheduling Algorithm

5 Performance Bound

Consider the objective function in the optimization (1), i.e., the

total cost of the generators for satisfying the constraints of
generation-load balance and transmission line capacity.

are the power generations based on the collected load

reports. are the optimal power generations.

Upperthat
is the probability the power consumption state
bound:
changes from H to L after TM time slots, and d is the difference
of power demand between the high and low demand states.

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Outline

Introduction
1
3

2 System Model

Scheduling Algorithm
3

4 Numerical Simulation

Conclusion
5
3

22
 Numerical Simulation

In this model, N=5 (five buses) and K=12, The transmission failure probabilities
are all set to
A, Myopic vs. Round Robin: Price Insensitive Case
B, Myopic vs. Round Robin: Price Sensitive Case
C, Myopic vs. Round Robin: Scheduling Multiple User
D, Myopic vs. DP

dynamic programming (DP) [32].

[32] R. A. Howard, Dynamic Probabilistic Systems: Markov Models . New York:

Dover, 1971.

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 Numerical Simulation

In this model, N=5 (five buses) and K=12, The transmission failure probabilities
are all set to
A, Myopic vs. Round Robin: Price Insensitive Case
Users per bus: 10~90,
High/low power consumption: 40MW/ 20 MW

Transition probabilities:

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 Numerical Simulation

In this model, N=5 (five buses) and K=12, The transmission failure probabilities
are all set to
B, Myopic vs. Round Robin: Price Sensitive Case
utility function for user nj
thus yielding the optimal power consumption:

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 Numerical Simulation

In this model, N=5 (five buses) and K=12, The transmission failure probabilities
are all set to
C, Myopic vs. Round Robin: Scheduling Multiple User
J=100~1000, assume 50 users can be scheduled simultaneously.
The power consumptions are assumed to be 1 MW and 2MW for the low and high
states, respectively, except that 20% of the users have a high power
consumption of 10 MW.

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 Numerical Simulation

In this model, N=5 (five buses) and K=12, The transmission failure probabilities
are all set to
D, Myopic vs. DP

27
 Numerical Simulation

In this model, N=5 (five buses) and K=12, The transmission failure probabilities
are all set to
C, Myopic vs. Round Robin: Scheduling Multiple User
D, Myopic vs. DP

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Outline

Introduction
1
3

2 System Model

Scheduling Algorithm
3

4 Numerical Simulation

Conclusion
5
3

29
 Conclusion

This paper studied the scheduling of wireless metering for the power market
pricing in smart grid.

The pricing mechanism has been formulated as a linear programming problem.

The framework of MDP has been applied to optimize the scheduling policy.
A myopic approach has been adopted to reduce the computational cost.
Numerical simulations have shown that the myopic approach can reduce 60%
price errors and 40% power generation errors in certain circumstances,
compared with the simple round robin scheme.
Compared with the DP based optimal strategy, the myopic approach is near-
optimal for the price error and achieves even better performances for power
generation and demand errors .

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Thank you !

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