Consensus-based decentralized scheduling method for collaborative operation in seaport virtual power plant

The accelerating trend towards electrification in seaport operations presents the opportunities for ports to achieve near zero and decarbonization strategies. However, integrating a large number of flexible resources into seaport energy systems introduces complex management challenges, including the need for coordinated charging of electrified vessels and the optimized energy utilization of seaport equipment. To address these challenges, we establish a seaport virtual power plant (SVPP) system model and an energy service model that leverages the concepts of vessel-to-shore (V2S) and vessel-to-vessel (V2V) for facilitating diverse energy transfer modes among the grid, shore, and vessels. To unlock the flexible value of electrified vessels, we propose an energy sharing scheduling method that integrates a hybrid V2S and V2V mode. This method considers the diversity in vessel berthing durations and charging demands, utilizing V2V interaction mechanisms among electrified vessels to determine the optimal shore-vessel scheduling schemes. To ensure the privacy and reliability of multi-entity operations, we design a decentralized energy management algorithm for the SVPP based on the consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). A decentralized optimization framework is designed based on the consensus mechanism. By introducing coupling information as consensus variables, we fully decouple the operations of multiple owners and solve the primal optimization problem in parallel. Additionally, by formulating two baseline optimization problems, we evaluate the effects of V2S and V2V on the overall SVPP and on the individual vessels. Simulation results demonstrate that introducing V2S can reduce the total cost by 13.68%, while the further integration of V2V can achieve a cost reduction of 26.56%. Notably, V2V interactions enhance the scheduling potential, particularly for vessels with longer berthing durations.