A Cost-Effective Online Dynamic Scheduling Method for Communication Services in Large-Scale Software-Defined Virtual Power Plants

Virtual power plants (VPPs), as an effective platform to aggregate the rapidly growing distributed energy resources (DERs), require software-defined networking (SDN) to provide stable and efficient communication service. In observing that increasing demand for communication services imposes high costs on VPP operators, this paper presents a cost-effective online dynamic scheduling method to minimize communication costs while maintaining quality of service (QoS). Specifically, by analyzing the communication network architecture and service types of large-scale software-defined VPPs (SD-VPPs), a P95 billing rule based offline dynamic scheduling model for minimizing communication costs is established to build an offline database. Moreover, a cost-effective online rolling approach is introduced to sequentially update future link traffic by matching data features with records in the offline database, effectively addressing P95 time-slot coupling challenges. Moreover, the cost-effective online rolling approach includes a fast routing decision-making algorithm to determine the billing bandwidth for each site based on preset P95 billing bandwidth and provide routing decisions for the current time slot efficiently. Numerical case studies verify the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, demonstrating superior economic performance with a two-order-of-magnitude improvement in computational efficiency over the state-of-the-art solver (i.e., Gurobi), especially in large-scale scenarios.