Title:

Demand Response in Smart Grids: The Auction Paradigm

Abstract:

The smart grid is a modern power grid that achieves high efficiency and robustness based on sophisticated information and communications technologies. Demand response has great potential in helping balance demand and supply in a smart grid, cutting peak generation capacity and hence electricity generation cost. Arguably, auctions represent the most natural and efficient approach for carrying out demand response between the power grid and large electricity users, microgrids, and electricity storage devices. This talk is about how demand response auctions can be mathematically modelled and designed, and how far can the performance limits be pushed, in terms of bid expressiveness, truthful information revelation, computational efficiency, and economic efficiency. In particular, we will present a demand response auction that is truthful, runs in polynomial time, and  achieves (1+epsilon)-optimal social cost for any arbitrarily small constant epsilon. The key technique lies in the marriage of smoothed analysis and randomized algorithm/mechanism design, which may have a broad range of applications in other mechanisms design problems where social welfare maximization is hard (NP-hard) but not too hard (admits a smoothed polynomial time algorithm). 

Bio:

Zongpeng Li is Associate Professor and Associate Head at the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He received his BSc (1999) from Tsinghua University, and MSc (2001) and PhD (2005) from University of Toronto. He was on sabbatical visit at the Institute of Network Coding, Chinese University of Hong Kong during 2011-2012. Zongpeng’s research interests are in computer networks, network coding, efficient market mechanisms for ICT, and smart grids. Zongpeng has published over 100 conference papers and journal articles, more than 40 of which are ranked in tier A by China Computer Federation (CCF).