Roles of retailers in the peer-to-peer electricity market: A single retailer perspective

Despite extensive research in the past five years and several successfully completed and on-going pilot projects, regulators are still reluctant to implement peer-to-peer trading at a large scale in today’s electricity market. The reason could partly be attributed to the perceived disadvantage of current market participants such as retailers due to their exclusion from market participation—a fundamental property of decentralized peer-to-peer trading. As a consequence, recently, there has been growing pressure from energy service providers in favor of retailers’ participation in peer-to-peer trading. However, the role of retailers in the peer-to-peer market is yet to be established, as no existing study has challenged this fundamental circumspection of decentralized trading. In this context, this perspective takes the first step to discuss the feasibility of retailers’ involvement in the peer-to-peer market. In doing so, we identify key characteristics of retail-based and peer-to-peer electricity markets and discuss our viewpoint on how to incorporate a single retailer in a peer-to-peer market without compromising the fundamental decision-making characteristics of both markets. Finally, we give an example of a hypothetical business model to demonstrate how a retailer can be a part of a peer-to-peer market with a promise of collective benefits for the participants

A Survey of Cyber-Physical Systems From a Game-Theoretic Perspective

With the emergence of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and communication technologies, cyber-physical systems (CPS) have revolutionized the engineering paradigm with profound applications in many aspects of society including homes, energy, agriculture, health-care, transportation, business, and manufacturing. A CPS uses suitable computational techniques such as game theory to enable different entities to interact with one another for taking necessary actions to obtain selected objectives. Recent literature on CPS has extensively used game theory to approach a variety of technical challenges. In order to make these contributions more accessible to a broader audience, there is a need for studies that can provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of different types of CPS and their attributes, then clearly outline why game theory is relevant for modeling different aspects of CPS, and also discuss how game theory has been used in relevant literature to date. This paper bridges this gap by 1) providing a general discussion of different types of CPS and their characteristics; 2) giving an overview of different types of game-theoretic approaches; 3) explaining why game theory is appropriate for modeling different types of CPS; and 4) finally, studying how game theory has been used in different CPS types to address their challenges. Further, we also identify some key research challenges for future investigation where game theory could be applied as a potential solution