Optimal energy exchange schemes in smart grid networks: A contract theoretic approach

Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) is a promising paradigm to alleviate energy supply and demand imbalance of the grid. To further improve the power transmission efficiency, in this paper, we propose a cloudlet-based Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) energy exchange framework. In the framework, the Energy Switch Center (ESC) serves as a trading broker, which purchases electricity from discharging vehicles and then resells it to the charging ones without energy transmission on the grid. The energy trading process is modeled in a contract theoretic approach. We derive the optimal feasible contracts which maximize the profit of the ESC. Furthermore, we systematically study the practical scenario where both the charging demand and renewable energy supplement are random variables, and propose a practical optimal contract-based electricity purchase scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can efficiently increase the profit of the ESC than the other mechanisms.