  Optimal day-ahead scheduling for a system-centric community energy management
system (CEMS) is proposed to provide economic benefits and user comfort of
energy management at the community level. Our proposed community includes
different types of homes and allows prosumers to trade energy locally using
mid-market rate pricing. A mathematical model of the community is constructed
and the optimization problem of this model is transformed into an MILP problem
that can be solved in a short time. By solving this MILP problem, the
optimization of the overall energy cost of the community and satisfaction of
the thermal comfort at every home are achieved. For comparison, we also
establish two different scenarios for the same community: a prosumer-centric
CEMS and no CEMS. The simulation results demonstrate that the overall energy
cost of the community with the system-centric CEMS is the smallest among the
three scenarios and is only half that of the community with the
prosumer-centric CEMS. Moreover, by using linear transformation, the
computational time of the optimization problem of the proposed system-centric
CEMS is only 118.2 s for a 500-home community, which is a short time for
day-ahead scheduling of a community.
