Stable Benefit Allocation for Economically Sustainable Coordination of Distributed Energy Resources: A WRT-Inspired Fidelity-Controlled Reduction Framework

Abstract

Local energy sharing can support more sustainable distribution systems by coordinating rooftop photovoltaic generation, behind-the-meter storage, and flexible demand among prosumers. Its expansion to larger energy communities, however, requires benefit-allocation mechanisms that remain computationally tractable while maintaining physically meaningful and sufficiently stable incentives for heterogeneous participants. This paper develops a fidelity-controlled WRT-inspired player-reduction framework for scalable cooperative energy sharing in distribution networks. Participants are characterized by physical–economic signatures incorporating temporal net demand, operational flexibility, stand-alone economics, marginal contribution, and network sensitivity. Candidate partitions generated through hierarchical entropy weighting and density-based grouping are screened according to feature-space compactness, member-wise game consistency, and aggregation-interaction consistency. Reduced coalitions are restored to their original participants before network-constrained physical evaluation, and the reduced-space nucleolus is subsequently recovered at the participant level. A split-coalition correction with independent out-of-sample validation is further introduced to improve allocation stability. For the primary N = 10 benchmark, the game consistent reduced formulation (Case 3) retains 6.07% of the original coalition space, limits the normalized L1 allocation error to 3.67%, and achieves a 5.40× speedup over the full-space nucleolus. The complete stability-corrected framework (Case 4) further reduces the out-of-sample violation probability from 0.900% to 0.433% while retaining a 1.73× speedup. Across five independently generated N = 10 instances, Case 4 achieves a median normalized L1 allocation error of 8.74% and a median speedup of 1.50×. At N = 30, the reduced representation contains 16,382 proper coalitions, corresponding to an approximately 6.55 × 104-fold reduction in coalition space. By enabling scalable and stability-aware benefit allocation while retaining participant heterogeneity and network operating constraints, the framework provides computational and economic enabling conditions for sustained participation in prosumer communities with distributed renewable energy resources. These outcomes concern the scalability and economic viability of cooperative participation.