H. F. Wedde, F. T. Breuer, W. Freund, E. Handschin, D. König und H. Neumann
Decentralized Real-Time Management of Largely Unpredicatable Power Needs and Supply
28th IFAC/IFIP Workshop on Real-Time Programming, Istanbul, Turkey, 2004-09-06
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 phases of the combined R&D project DEZENT, 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, under distribute control or local autonomy. The multi-agent system services support is provided through the safety-critical real-time operating system MELODY. We briefly outline a two-stage distributed negotiation algorithm, for day-ahead planning and handling of unpredictable power need and supply situations. We model a representative scenario to explain various negotiation strategies for the agents involved on behalf of producers/ consumers. We report on the results of different negotiation strategies in distributed experiments. Due to the very high flexibility and (obviously much higher) fault tolerance of the decentralized DEZENT architecture we eventually expect considerable lower costs compared to a centralized power supply and consumption management.