Horst F. Wedde, Frank Thorsten Breuer, Wolfgang Freund, E. Handschin, D. König und H. Neumann
Dezent - A Safety-Critical Real-Time Approach for Decentralized Electric Power Management
24th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium, WIP Proceedings, Hrsg.: Sanjoy K. Baruah und Raj Rajkumar, S. 165-168, IEEE Computer Society, Cancun, Mexico, 2003
The major problem for establishing technologies based on solar or wind power, or on renewable energy sources, is an adequate management for the densely networked power sources. This paper describes the first phase of the combined R&D project DEZENT to be funded shortly, between the Schools of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Dortmund, devoted to decentralized and adaptive electric power management through a distributed real-time multi-agent architecture. A novel research problem to be specifically faced in this respect is the appropriate handling of unpredictable consumer requests or producer problems. Hence a key result for its solution is that the agents can be most adequately supported through the reactive and adaptable real-time services in the safety-critical operating system MELODY (see [WeL97, WLMR99, WBF01] for selective reading). We briefly outline a two-stage distributed negotiation algorithm, for day-ahead planning and handling of unpredictable power needs and supply situations. Through a 3-year experimental study we will evaluate our claim that both individual/ local consumer and global production and distribution costs will be comparably lower than under a centralized management, let alone their superior flexibility and reliability.