Decentralized Coalition Formation with Agent-based Combinatorial Heuristics

A steadily growing pervasion of the energy distribution grid with communication technology is widely seen as an enabler for new computational coordination techniques for renewable, distributed generation as well as for bundling with controllable consumers. Smart markets will foster a decentralized grid management. One important task as prerequisite to decentralized management is the ability to group together in order to jointly gain enough suitable flexibility and capacity to assume responsibility for a specific control task in the grid. In self-organized smart grid scenarios, grouping or coalition formation has to be achieved in a decentralized and situation aware way based on individual capabilities. We present a fully decentralized coalition formation approach based on an established agent-based heuristics for predictive scheduling with the additional advantage of keeping all information about local decision base and local operational constraints private. Two closely interlocked optimization processes orchestrate an overall procedure that adapts a coalition structure to best suit a given set of energy products. The approach is evaluated in several simulation scenarios with different type of established models for integrating distributed energy resources and is also extended to the induced use case of surplus distribution using basically the same algorithm

Access to Electricity, Information and Communications Technology (ICT), and Financial Development: Evidence from West Africa

Poor Access to electricity may hinder West African countries from raising levels of financial development with the aid of Information communication Technology (ICT). Using 16 West African countries, and data over the period of 2000 to 2017, this present study analyses the effect of greater access to electricity on financial development through ICT. ICT was measured using mobile use and internet use, while financial development was measured using private bank credit to GDP ratio and Broad Money Supply to GDP ratio. Panel data fixed effect instrumental variables estimation was used for analysis and the study found that access to electricity significantly boosts mobile use and internet use, while resulting from access to electricity mobile use significantly boosted both measures of financial development but internet use significantly reduced the measures. Further categorizing sample countries into Anglophone and Francophone West Africa countries, access to electricity through ICT boosted both measures of financial development for Francophone countries, while only boosting broad money supply to GDP ratio for Anglophone countries. Thus greater access to electricity through for example provision of electricity infrastructure and regulation of electricity charges to households and firms is important to boost levels of financial development in West Afric