  This paper proposes a decentralized energy management (DEM) strategy for a
network of local microgrids, providing economically balanced energy schedules
for all participating microgrids. The proposed DEM strategy can preserve the
privacy of each microgrid by only requiring them to share network power
exchange information. The proposed DEM strategy enhances the traditional
alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) formulation for networks of
microgrids by examining the global objective value as well as the solution
quality. A novel stopping decision combining these two metrics is proposed for
the enhanced objective-based ADMM (OB-ADMM) method. This paper also presents a
centralized energy management (CEM) model as a benchmark, and a post-processing
proportional exchange algorithm (PEA) to balance the economic benefit of each
microgrid. The resulting proposed OB-ADMM model combined with the PEA delivers
the final high-fidelity optimal solution for multiple microgrids in a
grid-connected collaborative power exchange network. Moreover, the proposed
decentralized operational strategy preserves the economic and privacy interests
of individual microgrid participants. Different network cases are simulated to
test the algorithm's performance, and the results validate the aforementioned
claims.
