A Cooperative P2P Trading Framework: Developed and Validated Through Hardware-in-Loop

In the past five years, the importance of peer-to-peer (P2P) trading for promoting the use of renewable energy has been demonstrated in many scientific literature and pilot projects. However, a large-scale demonstration of P2P trading in today’s electricity market is yet to be implemented. The reason for this can be partially attributed to two factors. First, most existing pilot projects focus on the aspects of communications between different participants and settlements of energy trading parameters between them without giving considerable attention to the impact of such trading on the distribution network. Second, scientific studies that have rigorously investigated the impact on distribution networks mostly validated their frameworks using numerical simulations without substantiating the findings through hardware implementation. In this paper, this gap is addressed by proposing a ready-to-implement canonical coalition game-based P2P energy trading scheme for electricity customers within a local distribution network. It is shown that the proposed scheme not only guarantees stable and fair outcomes for all participants, but also satisfies all mandatory power network constraints during the trading process. Importantly, the proposed framework is implemented in an RSCAD-RTDS (real-time digital simulator) platform and the readiness of the scheme for a real-field trial is demonstrated through validation in software-in-loop and hardware-in-loop setups. The usefulness and suitability of the proposed scheme to be implemented in today’s electricity network are established via both software-in-loop and hardware-in-loop case studies.