Agent technology for smart grids

Agent technology for smart grids

Our main research lines comprise coordination mechanisms and services for the efficient use of shared limited resources. We frequently apply them to environments with autonomous stakeholders where, besides efficiency, different types of fairness and “social welfare” as well as all sorts of “security” constraints need to be considered, so as to enable an effective implementation. For this purpose, we usually combine multiagent techniques from a sandbox that we call “agreement technologies” (semantic technologies, market-based mechanisms, automated negotiation and argumentation, trust and reputation, norms and organisations, …). A key application area is the smart grid. The integration of small-scale intermittent producers of renewable energy, the advent of smart appliances, the increasing penetration of electric vehicles, etc., together with the opportunities opened up by management infrastructures that allow for two-way communication among stakeholders, call for flexible, efficient, secure, and yet decentralised coordination mechanisms. We are particularly interested in mechanisms and services that work in a “bottom-up” fashion, i.e. that provide incentives for owners to offer their resource to the grid in certain situations or at certain times, while keeping them under their control at others. We envision those service-level agreements to be negotiated, executed, and controlled in a peer-to-peer fashion. Recent work includes non manipulable mechanisms for efficient plug-in electric vehicle charging in residential neighbourhoods, novel payments schemes to foster the economic feasibility of coalitions between wind energy providers and electric vehicle owners, coalition formation based on bilateral shapely values for demand-response, as well as heuristics for dynamic coalitions of households in the context of demand-side management.