Prevision and planning for residential agents in a transactive energy environment

Transactive Energy (TE) has brought exciting opportunities for all stakeholders in energy markets by enabling management decentralization. This new paradigm empowers demand-side agents to play a more active role through coordinating, cooperating, and negotiating with other agents. Nevertheless, most of these agents are not used to process market signals and develop optimal strategies, especially in the residential sector. Accordingly, it is indispensable to create tools that automate and facilitate demand-side participation in TE systems. This paper presents a new methodology for residential automated agents to perform two key tasks: prevision and planning. Specifically, the proposed method is applied to a forward market where agents' planning is a fundamental step to maintain the dynamic balance between demand and generation. Since planning depends on future demand, agents' prevision of consumption is an inevitable part of this step. The procedures for automating the targeted tasks are developed in a general way for residential prosumers and consumers, interacting at the distribution level. These players are managed by a demand aggregator as the leader by means of the Stackelberg game. The suggested process results in a TE setup for multi-stage single-side auctions, useful to manage future Smart Energy Markets. Through simulated transactions, this paper examines the market clearing mechanism and the convenience of agents' planning. The results show that customers with higher price-elasticity leverage lower costs periods. However, they make it harder to reduce the peak-to-average ratio of the aggregated demand profile since a unique price signal can create prisoner's dilemma conditions.

Mots clés

Agents interaction; Forward market; Multi-agent system; Price-elasticity; Prosumer; Smart energy markets; Stackelberg game; Transactive energy; Utility function