Managing Deregulated Energy Markets: an Adaptive and Autonomous Multi-Agent System Application

Given the complexity of modelling actors and interactions of the deregulated electric energy market, the Multi-Agent System approach turns out to be suitable for both simulation and application of critical aspects in the Smart Grid. In particular, for balancing demand and offer and for handling negotiation among peers: now, even a domestic environment that features photovoltaic and/or wind turbines modules can decide to enter the deregulated market as a small-scale seller, thus making the requirement of having such an architecture to be autonomous by deploying Self-* properties such as Self-Organization, Self- Repairing, Self-Adaptation. To be more specific about the presented case study, we propose a model in which small-scale seller agents dynamically and autonomously decide either to address the market as lone operators or by aggregating into Virtual Power Plants, from time to time in order to adapt to different situations. This iterated decisional process depends on highly variable market related factors, thus our goal is to design a net of agents able to autonomously react to this dynamic environment.