Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are considered as flexible loads since their charging schedules can be shifted over the course of a day without impacting drivers’ mobility. This property can be exploited to reduce charging costs and adverse network impacts. The increasing number of PEVs makes the use of distributed charging coordinating strategies preferable to centralized ones. In this paper, we propose an agent-based method which enables a fully distributed solution of the PEVs’ Coordinated Charging (PEV-CC) problem. This problem aims at coordinating the charging schedules of a fleet of PEVs to minimize costs of serving demand subject to individual PEV constraints originating from battery limitations and charging infrastructure characteristics. In our proposed approach, each PEV’s charging station is considered as an agent that is equipped with communication and computation capabilities. Our multiagent approach is an iterative procedure which finds a distributed solution for the first order optimality conditions of the underlying optimization problem through local computations and limited information exchange with neighboring agents. In particular, the updates for each agent incorporate local information such as the Lagrange multipliers, as well as enforcing the local PEV’s constraints as local innovation terms. Finally, the performance of our proposed algorithm is evaluated on a fleet of 100 PEVs as a test case, and the results are compared with the centralized solution of the PEV-CC problem.
 Gossip algorithms are attractive for in-network processing in sensor networks because they do not require any specialized routing, there is no bottleneck or single point of failure, and they are robust to unreliable wireless network conditions. Recently, there has been a surge of activity in the computer science, control, signal processing, and information theory communities, developing faster and more robust gossip algorithms and deriving theoretical performance guarantees. This paper presents an overview of recent work in the area. We describe convergence rate results, which are related to the number of transmitted messages and thus the amount of energy consumed in the network for gossiping. We discuss issues related to gossiping over wireless links, including the effects of quantization and noise, and we illustrate the use of gossip algorithms for canonical signal processing tasks including distributed estimation, source localization, and compression. In a smart grid, effective distributed control algorithms could be embedded in distributed controllers to properly allocate electrical power among connected buses autonomously. By selecting the incremental cost of each generation unit as the consensus variable, the incremental cost consensus (ICC) algorithm is able to solve the conventional centralized economic dispatch problem in a distributed manner. The mathematical formulation of the algorithm has been presented in this paper. The results of several case studies have also been presented to show that the difference between network topologies will influence the convergence rate of the ICC algorithm. Economic dispatch problem (EDP) is an important class of optimization problems in the smart grid, which aims at minimizing the total cost when generating certain amount of power. In this work, a novel consensus based algorithm is proposed to solve EDP in a distributed fashion. The quadratic convex cost functions are assumed in the problem formulation, and the strongly connected communication topology is sufficient for the information exchange. Unlike centralized approaches, the proposed algorithm enables generators to collectively learn the mismatch between demand and total amount of power generation. The estimated mismatch is then used as a feedback mechanism to adjust current power generation by each generator. With a tactical initial setup, eventually, all generators can automatically minimize the total cost in a collective sense.  Energy management is becoming a crucial issue in the future power grid system as more controllable energy resources and responsive loads with communications abilities are being introduced into the smart grid. This paper proposes a novel distributed approach to deal with energy management in the smart grid under dispatchable distributed generators and responsive loads using real-time pricing (RTP) and consensus networks to maximize the social welfare. In our algorithm, each distributed generation consumer unit, in response to the local price of energy, decides on its optimal power generation consumption level to maximize its benefit at the device level. However, the consensus-based coordination of price among local retailers drives the behavior of the overall system toward the global optimum, despite the greedy behavior of the generation and consumer units. The main features of our algorithm are computational and communicational scalability, as well as privacy of information. This paper provides a theoretical framework for analysis of consensus algorithms for multi-agent networked systems with an emphasis on the role of directed information flow, robustness to changes in network topology due to link node failures, time-delays, and performance guarantees. An overview of basic concepts of information consensus in networks and methods of convergence and performance analysis for the algorithms are provided. Our analysis framework is based on tools from matrix theory, algebraic graph theory, and control theory. We discuss the connections between consensus problems in networked dynamic systems and diverse applications including synchronization of coupled oscillators, flocking, formation control, fast consensus in small-world networks, Markov processes and gossip-based algorithms, load balancing in networks, rendezvous in space, distributed sensor fusion in sensor networks, and belief propagation. We establish direct connections between spectral and structural properties of complex networks and the speed of information diffusion of consensus algorithms. A brief introduction is provided on networked systems with nonlocal information flow that are considerably faster than distributed systems with lattice-type nearest neighbor interactions. Simulation results are presented that demonstrate the role of small-world effects on the speed of consensus algorithms and cooperative control of multivehicle formations This paper reviews signal processing research for applications in the future electric power grid, commonly referred to as smart grid. Generally, it is expected that the grid of the future would differ from the current system by the increased integration of distributed generation, distributed storage, demand response, power electronics, and communications and sensing technologies. The consequence is that the physical structure of the system becomes significantly more distributed. The existing centralized control structure is not suitable any more to operate such a highly distributed system. Hence, in this paper, we overview distributed approaches, all based on consensus @math innovations, for three common energy management functions: state estimation, economic dispatch, and optimal power flow. We survey the pertinent literature and summarize our work. Simulation results illustrate tradeoffs and the performance of consensus @math innovations for these three applications. This paper presents a distributed algorithm based on auction techniques and consensus protocols to solve the nonconvex economic dispatch problem. The optimization problem of the nonconvex economic dispatch includes several constraints such as valve-point loading effect, multiple fuel option, and prohibited operating zones. Each generating unit locally evaluates quantities used as bids in the auction mechanism. These units send their bids to their neighbors in a communication graph that supports the power system and which provides the required information flow. A consensus procedure is used to share the bids among the network agents and resolves the auction. As a result, the power distribution of generating units is updated and the generation cost is minimized. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by simulations on standard test systems. The paper presents a fully distributed approach for economic dispatch in power systems. The approach is based on the consensus + innovations framework, in which each network agent participates in a collaborative process of neighborhood message exchange and local computation. The distributed approach is shown to converge to the optimal dispatch under rather weak assumptions on the agent communication network connectivity. Intuitively, the proposed approach includes a consensus term which achieves convergence to a common incremental cost value and an innovation term which ensures that the total generation is equal to the load to be supplied. Further, in the proposed approach each network bus only needs to be aware of its local cost parameters and the local predicted load and the neighborhood communication involves exchanging only the locally determined marginal energy price with a few neighbors. Robustness of the proposed approach and techniques for convergence rate improvement are discussed. Finally, simulation studies on the benchmark IEEE 14 bus system demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.