Truthful Mechanisms for Combinatorial Allocation of Electric Power in Alternating Current Electric Systems for Smart Grid

TL;DR

This paper develops truthful approximation algorithms for complex-demand knapsack problems in smart grid power allocation, addressing quadratic constraints and extending previous results with new PTAS and FPTAS solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive study of the complex-demand knapsack problem with truthful mechanisms, providing the first PTAS and FPTAS for different demand phase ranges.

Findings

Provides a truthful PTAS for demand phase b8a0b4;

Offers a truthful FPTAS that nearly optimizes the objective;

Shows hardness results preventing PTAS for certain phase ranges.

Abstract

Traditional studies of combinatorial auctions often only consider linear constraints. The rise of smart grid presents a new class of auctions, characterized by quadratic constraints. This paper studies the {\em complex-demand knapsack problem}, in which the demands are complex valued and the capacity of supplies is described by the magnitude of total complex-valued demand. This naturally captures the power constraints in alternating current (AC) electric systems. In this paper, we provide a more complete study and generalize the problem to the multi-minded version, beyond the previously known $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation algorithm for only a subclass of the problem. More precisely, we give a truthful PTAS for the case $\phi\in[0,\frac{\pi}{2}-\delta]$, and a truthful FPTAS, which {\it fully} optimizes the objective function but violates the capacity constraint by at most $(1+\epsilon)$, for the case $\phi\in(\frac{\pi}{2},\pi-\delta]$, where $\phi$ is the maximum argument of any complex-valued demand and $\epsilon,\delta>0$ are arbitrarily small constants. We complement these results by showing that, unless P=NP, neither a PTAS for the case $\phi\in(\frac{\pi}{2},\pi-\delta]$ nor any bi-criteria approximation algorithm with polynomial guarantees for the case when $\phi$ is arbitrarily close to $\pi$ (that is, when $\delta$ is arbitrarily close to $0$) can exist.