Artificial Intelligence and Optimization for Virtual Power Plant Operations
A special issue of Energies (ISSN 1996-1073). This special issue belongs to the section "F5: Artificial Intelligence and Smart Energy".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 August 2026 | Viewed by 190
Editor
Interests: electricity market; power demand side management; virtual power plant; artificial intelligence
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The accelerated transition toward carbon neutrality and the rapid development of electricity spot markets are profoundly reshaping power system operation and planning. In this evolving market environment, demand-side management, especially the virtual power plant, is being entrusted with new responsibilities while facing unprecedented challenges. The increasing penetration of renewable energy, coupled with volatile spot prices, has led to highly complex, nonlinear and multi-timescale decision-making problems. Meanwhile, the large-scale deployment of distributed demand-side resources—characterized by small individual capacities, dispersed locations and uncertain behavior—poses significant challenges in accurate forecasting, reliable aggregation, market participation and risk management. These issues are further compounded by the need for market-rule adaptability, data security and user privacy protection. Artificial intelligence has emerged as a powerful enabler for addressing these challenges. By leveraging data-driven forecasting, intelligent aggregation, autonomous decision-making, adaptive optimization and privacy-preserving technologies, AI-based methods offer transformative potential to enhance system flexibility, improve renewable energy accommodation and unlock the market value of the virtual power plant. Such advances are essential for enabling fair and efficient participation of virtual power plants in electricity and ancillary service markets and for supporting the construction of a new-generation power system with high shares of renewable energy.
This Special Issue aims to present and disseminate the latest theoretical developments, methodological innovations and practical applications of artificial intelligence in virtual power plants under market-oriented environments. Contributions are expected to advance intelligent decision-making, resource aggregation, market mechanisms, multi-timescale scheduling, data security and platform engineering, thereby providing critical scientific and technological support for the intelligent transformation of virtual power plants and the sustainable evolution of modern power systems.
Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to:
- AI-based methods for assessing the adjustable potential of a virtual power plant
- Intelligent aggregation modeling of a virtual power plant
- Forecasting techniques for a virtual power plant
- AI-based strategies for virtual power plants’ participation in spot market transactions
- Market mechanisms for the participation of the virtual power plant
- Data-driven bidding strategies for a virtual power plant in ancillary service markets
- AI-based collaborative optimization and privacy protection technologies of the virtual power plant
- Multi-time-scale scheduling strategies for high shares of renewable energy in a virtual power plant
- “Cloud-Edge-End” collaborative architecture for intelligent control of a virtual power plant
- Applications of AI in distributed electricity markets
- Interactive game theory analysis of a virtual power plant in the distributed energy market
- Intelligent risk assessment and risk-hedging strategies
- AI-based scenario generation and robust optimization
- Architectural design and engineering practices of intelligent management platforms
Dr. Xingyu Yan
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- artificial intelligence
- power demand-side management
- smart grid
- electricity market
- microgrid
- virtual power plant
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