Trust & Fair Resource Allocation in Community Energy Systems

The energy sector faces numerous challenges, including rising electricity costs and inconsistent services due to network overload, often requiring the involvement of a central network operator to address these issues. However, a user-centric approach that prioritizes demand-side management, exemplified by decentralized Community Energy Systems (dCES), presents a promising solution to energy distribution and supply network challenges. dCES can be conceptualized as a small-scale, dynamic distribution network seamlessly integrated into the broader framework of the Smart Grid. In this paradigm, prosumers play an active role, as they must contribute to and draw from a shared energy resource pool, with the overarching goal of avoiding depletion. Specifically, various individuals with different energy consumption patterns and preferences work together to solve collective action problems, i.e., blackouts. Motivated firstly by fair resource allocation, and secondly by the idea that trust is a crucial factor for successful collective action among diverse individuals, we developed a suitable Multi-Agent System (MAS) for dCES to prevent resource depletion. Our experimental results show that introducing trust into dCES can lead to successful collective action, resulting in stable energy networks.