An Optimized and Decentralized Energy Provision System for Smart Cities

Abstract

Energy efficiency and data security of smart grids are one of the major concerns in the context of implementing modern approaches in smart cities. For the intelligent management of energy systems, wireless sensor networks and advanced metering infrastructures have played an essential role in the transformation of traditional cities into smart communities. In this paper, a smart city energy model is proposed in which prosumer communities were built by interconnecting energy self-sufficient households to generate, consume and share clean energy on a decentralized trading platform by integrating blockchain technology with a smart microgrid. The efficiency and stability of the grid network were improved by using several wireless sensor nodes that manage a massive amount of data in the network. However, long communication distances between sensor nodes and the base station can greatly consume the energy of sensors and decrease the network lifespan. Therefore, bio-inspired algorithm approaches were proposed to improve routing by obtaining the shortest path for traversing the entire network and increasing the system performance in terms of the efficient selection of cluster heads, reduced energy consumption, and extended network lifetime. This was carried out by studying the properties and mechanisms of biological systems and applying them in the communication systems in order to obtain the best results for a specific problem. In this comprehensive model, particle swarm optimization and a genetic algorithm are used to search for the optimal solution in any problem space in less processing time.

Keywords

• microgrid
• bio-inspired algorithms
• wireless sensor network
• genetic algorithm
• particle swarm optimization
• advanced metering infrastructure