A survey on transactive energy management approaches in energy communities

The adoption of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) causes fluctuating peak supply at certain times of the day, leading to grid congestion and energy shortages in community micro-grids during other periods. However, the rise of DERs has led to community-based microgrids called Energy Communities (ECs), which consist of flexible sources like DERs, energy storage systems, and electric vehicles. Transactive Energy Management (TEM) approaches are essential for leveraging the flexibility of ECs to support various grid objectives, including congestion management, peak shaving, and cost minimization. This paper presents a survey of TEM approaches with a focus on ECs. The TEM approaches from the surveyed article are placed in one of six clusters: Energy management goals, robustness, computational nature, privacy, scalability, and compatibility for isolated ECs. This survey presents the direction in which research in TEM approaches for ECs is heading and, combined with the needs of the ongoing energy transition, suggests directions for future research efforts. Specifically, it is observed that while the initial energy management approaches consisted of centralized solvers dependent on perfect predictions, there is a gradual shift towards investigating decentralized and robust approaches to energy management. Drawing upon the inferences from the clustering, this paper presents a discussion on the need for agent-based approaches evolving into a multi-agent energy system and eventually transforming into a scalable approach consisting of a system of systems.