Bilevel Aggregator-Prosumers' Optimization Problem in Real-Time: A Convex Optimization Approach

This paper proposes a Real-Time Market (RTM) platform for an aggregator and its corresponding prosumers to participate in the electricity wholesale market. The proposed energy market platform is modeled as a bilevel optimization problem where the aggregator and the prosumers are considered as self-interest agents. The current state-of-the-art Mathematical Programming with Equilibrium Constraints (MPEC) and Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) based approaches to solve bilevel optimization problems are not satisfactory for real-time applications. The computation time for such approaches grows exponentially as the number of prosumers and decision variables increase. This paper presents a convex optimization problem which can capture a subset of the set of global optima of the bilevel problem as its optimal solution.