Agent-based services for building markets in distributed energy environments

Abstract

The safe integration of renewable energy sources requires distributed energy environments provided with reactive and dynamic management systems. To this end, recent works propose creating energy micromarkets in which producers and consumers are capable of negotiating their interests by using autonomous software entities. Despite intelligent agents are widely accepted as a suitable technology for undertaking this task, we point out that their adoption entails important risks. Specifically, this paper highlight a set of technological and structural challenges that implies the integration of agents with distributed energy networks and, as a result, it concludes that new contributions are necessary in the modelling field for building more flexible, reactive and scalable networks. With this aim, we put forward a new agent-based and services-oriented model called Agency Services that, apart from overcoming most of the challenges faced by the current proposals, gives new capabilities.