Tim Baarslag and Michael Kaisers of CWI's Intelligent & Autonomous Systems group have been awarded the Best Paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids in Aalborg, Denmark.
They won the prize for their paper titled "Energy Contract Settlements through Automated Negotiation in Residential Cooperatives" (Shantanu Chakraborty, Tim Baarslag, Michael Kaisers).
The paper presents an automated peer-to-peer negotiation strategy for settling energy contracts among prosumers in a Residential Energy Cooperative (REC) considering heterogeneous prosumer preferences. The heterogeneity arises from prosumers' evaluation of energy contracts through multiple societal and environmental criteria and the prosumers' private preferences over those criteria. The prosumers engage in bilateral negotiations with peers to mutually agree on periodical energy contracts/loans that consist of an energy volume to be exchanged at that period and the return time of the exchanged energy. The prosumers keep an ordered preference profile of possible energy contracts by evaluating the contracts from their own valuations on the entailed criteria, and iteratively offer the peers contracts until an agreement is formed. A prosumer embeds the valuations into a utility function that further considers uncertainties imposed by demand and generation profiles.
Empirical evaluation on real demand, generation and storage profiles illustrates that the proposed negotiation based strategy is able to increase the system efficiency (measured by utilitarian social welfare) and fairness (measured by Nash social welfare) over a baseline strategy and an individual flexibility control strategy. The researchers thus elicit system benefits from P2P flexibility exchange already with few agents and without central coordination, providing a simple yet flexible and effective paradigm that may complement existing markets.
