Load Shifting Agents for Automated Demand Side Management in Micro Energy Grids

This paper describes a novel approach for the automated management of micro energy grids. In particular a market based resource allocation mechanism is used to control energy generators and consumers within a micro energy grid. This approach requires energy consumers (producers) to buy (sell) their energy demands (supplies) through a specialized electronic auction platform. But as manually negotiating all energy demands and supplies on such a market is a tedious task, its automation is highly desirable and thus leads to the main contribution of this paper: The automation of the demand side bidding process through electronic bidding agents, which are equipped with an intelligent buying strategy that allows them to dynamically react to market changes and adapt their bidding behavior accordingly. More precisely, the agents are able to shift energy demand within certain boundaries from (expensive) peak hours to those times of the day where energy demand and thus energy prices are lower in order to minimize their cost. Moreover, as our results show, this behavior leads to a smoothed load curve for the whole system, i.e. demand peaks are reduced while base load increases.