A Cost-Aware Framework for Prosumer Flexibility Coordination

Demand-side flexibility is inherently determined by complex local operations, whereas system-level coordination requires a compact and tractable representation of this flexibility. Bridging this gap is essential for economically coordinating heterogeneous prosumers. To this end, this study develops a cost-aware coordination framework. First, prosumer-level flexibility is characterized through the feasible redispatch of coupled electrical and thermal resources, allowing the flexibility representation to reflect actual internal operational capability. Second, a surrogate model transforms the implicit flexibility quantity–cost relationship into an explicit piecewise-linear function, which is directly incorporated into heterogeneous cost-aware disaggregation. Third, these processes are integrated within a hierarchical coordination mechanism through a compact interface, in which only flexibility potentials and cost functions are exchanged while detailed device information remains local. Case studies demonstrate that this compact representation preserves both cost fidelity and allocation efficiency, achieving realized cost savings of up to 49.94% relative to the practical benchmarks while remaining within 0.13% of the centralized full-information benchmark.