Horst F. Wedde, Sebastian Lehnhoff, Edmund Handschin und Olav Krause
Autonomous Real-Time Management of Unpredictable Power Needs and Supply (TR #810)
2007-01
During the past few years a world-wide trend towards renewable and ecologically clean forms of energy has been steadily growing. Private investments are encouraged and heavily subsidized in most of the European countries, through tax deductions, and even more through a very favorable refund program for feeding electric power from renewable sources into the public network. Wind or solar power production is typically decentralized, and, to a large extent, consumers are also producers and vice versa. In our DEZENT project (Decentralized Management of Electric Power Distribution) we have developed a novel distributed algorithm for autonomous agents who directly, on behalf of producers and consumers, negotiate quantities and prices. Within 10 to 50 msec the available supply and current needs are accommodated such that at most a negligible number of users is left unsatisfied after the first period. Also, in our multiagent based system no malicious user or a coalition thereof may take an illegal advantage of the distribution of information and control such as arising from the simultaneity of producer and consumer roles. In this paper we refine our original algorithm in such a way that extreme “market” strategies like excessive or lazy bargaining are effectively excluded. While not really restricting the user autonomy this makes the participants self-supportive in nearly every respect. At any rate, consumer prices can be expected to be much lower than under conventional distribution and management structures.