The electrical power industry has evolved into a distributed and competitive industry in which market forces drive the price of energy. Deregulation led to the establishment of wholesale markets, where competing generators can offer their electricity output to retailers, and retail markets, where end-use customers can choose their suppliers. Electricity markets are indeed a complex and evolving reality, meaning that researchers lack insight into numerous open problems that are being raised. Chief among these is the need of new market designs to manage the variability and uncertainty of the increasing levels of renewable generation.
Also, future power systems will integrate a large number of distributed energy resources and new players. Smart Grids are intrinsically linked to the challenges raised by new power systems and are expected to improve their efficiency and effectiveness, while ensuring reliability and a secure delivery of electricity to end-users. They should be capable of autonomously and intelligently configuring themselves to make the most efficient use of the available resources, to be robust to different kinds of failures and energy production deviations, and to be extendable and adaptable in the face of the rapidly changing technologies and requirements.
The distributed nature of all these systems, and the autonomous behaviour expected for them, points towards software agents and multi-agent systems as a foundation for their realisation and deployment. Accordingly, the focus of this workshop is on the application of software agents and multi-agent systems to electricity markets for integrating variable renewable energy and emerging technologies, such as smart grids, distributed generation, demand response, storage, smart homes and electrical vehicles.
For more information: Workshop on Multi-agent based Applications for Energy Markets, Smart Grids and Sustainable Energy Systems (MASGES)