A Comparison of Three Parallel Processing Methods for a Resource Allocation Problem in the Smart Grid

Aggregators are market participants that bridge the gap between the bulk electricity market and the emerging active end-user (smart home) by efficiently scheduling or allocating resources to meet certain objectives in the electricity grid. The computational burden and processing time of such allocation problems increases with the number of resources. Using high performance computing and parallel processing techniques, the computational time for simulating the environment can be managed. In this paper, we present and compare three parallel processing techniques executed on a dedicated high performance computer for simulating a multi-day aggregator-based resource allocation problem in the Smart Grid.