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Intelligent Decentralised Energy-Aware Systems (iDEaS)
This project aims to explore the issues associated with the decentralised control, operation and management of future generation electricity networks. It is targetted at scenarios in which micro-generation and storage capabilities are ubiquitous, where intelligent sensing devices allow users to make informed choices about the control of devices in their home, and where producers and consumers are connected via a series of dynamically negotiated supply contracts. This is an industrially funded project from a Hampshire-based company.
Home SettingThis setting will consider the intelligent use of energy within a single home. It will develop algorithms and methodologies that will enable intelligent appliances and energy storage devices (such as plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) to autonomously negotiate and coordinate for optimal energy use. In particular, it will address the need for algorithms that can continuously adapt the behaviour of the home in response to information such as weather, energy prices, energy carbon content and the lifestyle and preferences of the home owners.Neighbourhood settingThe neighbourhood setting aims to study the optimization of energy for the homes in a local neighbourhood. Each of these homes in a neighbourhood follows some electricity consumption pattern, based on the preferences of the residents. Also, some of these homes could also have a local (green) electricity generator, such as PV solar panels or a wind turbine. Furthermore, there may be some local storage capability of produced energy, which can be either local (e.g. a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle), or a shared neighbourhood storage facility (e.g. a redox flow battery). Given this setting, we envisage that intelligent sensing devices could not only optimize the local demand in each home, but also buy the required electricity, or trade the locally produced energy, on a neighbourhood energy market. The grid company is also a player in this market. The main concern on the grid side is the reduction of the so-called ``peak demand" (i.e. demand in periods of time when the network is overloaded). Therefore, the performance criteria in designing such a market are two- fold: it should reduce as much as possible the costs for each home owner, subject to satisfying his/her constraints. But it should also balance loads within the neighbourhood, so as to reduce peak-time demand on the grid side of the system.Grid settingBuilding on the home and neighbourhood setting, in this part of the project we aim to look at the implications of Decentralised Energy (DE) on the coordination of energy production, transmission and distribution. In particular, the coordination of switches (when there is a surge in demand or breakage of transmission lines) is important in building robustness into the network. Moreover, the fact that energy production can take various forms (e.g. from batteries, green energy sources, or coal power stations) and the fact that consumers may express preferences on the type of energy source referred means that transmission and distribution needs to be coordinated to ensure effective delivery of electricity. Against the above background, we aim to study the applicability of various multiagent system tools and techniques.Type: Normal Research Project KeywordsPartners
Funding
Principal InvestigatorsOther InvestigatorsAssociated PublicationsNumber of items: 14. Ramchurn, S., Vytelingum, P., Rogers, A. and Jennings, N. (2012) Putting the "Smarts" into the Smart Grid: A Grand Challenge for Artificial Intelligence. Communications of the ACM . (In Press) Chalkiadakis, G., Robu, V., Kota, R., Rogers, A. and Jennings, N. (2011) Cooperatives of Distributed Energy Resources for Efficient Virtual Power Plants. In: The Tenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2011), 2-6 May 2011, Taipei, Taiwan. pp. 787-794. Gerding, E., Robu, V., Stein, S., Parkes, D., Rogers, A. and Jennings, N. (2011) Online Mechanism Design for Electric Vehicle Charging. In: The Tenth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2011), 2-6 May 2011, Taipei, Taiwan. pp. 811-818. Ramchurn, S., Vytelingum, P., Rogers, A. and Jennings, N. (2011) Agent-Based Control for Decentralised Demand Side Management in the Smart Grid. In: The Tenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2011) , 2-6 May 2011, Taipei, Taiwan. pp. 5-12. Ramchurn, S., Vytelingum, P., Rogers, A. and Jennings, N. (2011) Agent-Based Homeostatic Control for Green Energy in the Smart Grid. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 2 (4). article 35. Robu, V., Stein, S., Gerding, E., Parkes, D., Rogers, A. and Jennings, N. (2011) An Online Mechanism for Multi-Speed Electric Vehicle Charging. In: Second International Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications (AMMA'11), August 2011, New York, USA. Voice, T., Vytelingum, P., Ramchurn, S., Rogers, A. and Jennings, N. (2011) Decentralised Control of Micro-Storage in the Smart Grid. In: AAAI-11: Twenty-Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August 7–11, 2011, San Francisco, USA. pp. 1421-1426. Vytelingum, P., Voice, T., Ramchurn, S., Rogers, A. and Jennings, N. (2011) Theoretical and Practical Foundations of Agent-Based Micro-Storage in the Smart Grid. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 42 . pp. 765-813. Robu, V., Vetsikas, I., Gerding, E. and Jennings, N. (2010) Addressing the Exposure Problem of Bidding Agents Using Flexibly Priced Options. In: 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), Lisbon, Portugal. pp. 581-586. Robu, V., Vetsikas, I., Gerding, E. and Jennings, N. (2010) Flexibly Priced Options: A New Mechanism for Sequential Auctions with Complementary Goods. In: Twelfth International Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC 2010), 10 May 2010, Toronto, Canada. pp. 29-42. Robu, V. and La Poutre, H. (2010) Designing bidding strategies in sequential auctions for risk averse agents. Multi-Agent and Grid Systems, 6 (5). pp. 437-457. ISSN 1574-1702 Rogers, A. and Jennings, N. (2010) Intelligent Agents for the Smart Grid. PerAda Magazine . Vytelingum, P., Ramchurn, S. D., Voice, T. D., Rogers, A. and Jennings, N. R. (2010) Trading agents for the smart electricity grid. In: The Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), May 10-14, 2010, Toronto, Canada. pp. 897-904. Vytelingum, P., Voice, T. D., Ramchurn, S. D., Rogers, A. and Jennings, N. R. (2010) Agent-Based Micro-Storage Management for the Smart Grid. In: The Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010) - Won the Best Paper Award, May 10-14, 2010, Toronto, Canada. pp. 39-46. Publications included from http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/projects/618.include. |
