It is significant to utilize renewable energy in expressway service area, establish grid-connected microgrid and manage its energy scheduling. To minimize the cost of service area microgrid, an energy optimization scheduling strategy for microgrid based on improved sparrow search algorithm(SSA) is proposed. Firstly, the load characteristics of the service area were analyzed, and the optimal scheduling model of the microgrid suitable for the service area was established. Aiming at the problems that the optimal scheduling model is difficult to solve and the traditional SSA algorithm converges too early and will fall into local optimum, the golden sine strategy and the adaptive T-distribution are introduced to improve the SSA. It can improve the optimization ability and convergence rate of the algorithm in solving the model. Taking a microgrid in a service area as an example, the results show that approach of this paper can reduce the daily operating cost by 12.5% compared with PSO, and reduce the operating cost by 7.1% compared with traditional SSA. The effectiveness of the presented method in solving the microgrid scheduling in service area is verified.