Cloud-Based and Big Data-Enabled Brokerage System for Smart Grids

Electric energy networks provide the energy necessary to carry out daily operations in education, health care, commerce, entertainment, defense, and government. Smart grids (SG) have been proposed as a mechanism to modernize and facilitate the operation of energy grids in the presence of multiple third-parties vying to sell electricity and related services. Recently, a new concept has emerged in relation with SG: transactive energy - a framework to integrate and coordinate multiple independent suppliers of electric services in an economic marketplace that enables purchases in a way that obeys the physical constrains of the underlying energy grid. Our team is developing a transactive energy framework called Open Access Smart Grids (OASIS). OASIS features a distribution-level marketplace where the underlying electric resources and services are open to access and provisioned by third parties. In this paper, we present a cloudbased and big data-enabled brokerage system for Smart grids, which is a critical component of OASIS. In this brokerage system, consumer energy requests, and energy bids issued by producers, are collected and matched to find a list of energy purchase orders to be dispatched to the winning producers. A central piece in the system is an energy broker software agent, which drives the bidding process.