A benchmark for multi-agent control of energy systems: The European economic area hybrid electricity network benchmark *

In this paper, we present a control-oriented benchmark of a network of dynamical systems representing an abstraction of the European Economic Area (EEA) electricity network. In the network each node represents a country of the EEA as an equivalent electrical area with specific generation and load features. The benchmark has been developed to provide the research community with a tool to assess non-centralized control strategies over a standardized case study. The Load Frequency Control (LFC) problem in the presence of renewable energy sources is considered, where the objective is to maintain a nominal operating frequency of the electricity network despite the presence of variations in the load request, and renewable energy production. A hybrid implementation of Energy Storage Systems (ESSs) with different operating modes is considered in the network to support energy generation. We test the features of the system through control simulations with centralized Model Predictive Control (MPC), and a Distributed MPC (DMPC) based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). The benchmark is provided together with a long-term access repository containing both the data, and the scripts to access and process the data.