A negotiation protocol for decentralised energy exchange between smart homes

Abstract

A number of recent projects are focused on providing access to electricity to the remote communities in developing world. Their idea is to provide renewable energy generation units and energy storage devices to homes in these communities. These resources enable a household to generate, store and consume energy according to its needs. However, these resources operate in isolation and we envision an interconnection of homes to allow the decentralised coordination of their resources in order to exchange energy. Energy exchange offers many advantages such as improving the efficient use of energy, and therefore, is a common practice in utility companies. However, the utility-scale exchanges require several resources (e.g. human experts who manually negotiate, on behalf of their companies, to reach exchange agreement) which are not present in remote communities. In contrast, we motivate the use of an automated negotiation solution and present a novel negotiation protocol to facilitate energy exchange between off-grid homes. The negotiation over energy exchange is multi-issue, where issues are interdependent on each other, and therefore, is more complex and difficult. To deal with complexity, our protocol imposes additional constraints on negotiation such that it reduces a complex interdependent multi-issue problem to one that is tractable. We prove that using our protocol, agents can reach a Pareto-optimal, dominant strategy equilibrium in a decentralised and timely fashion. We empirically evaluate our approach with the real data and show that, in this case, energy exchange can be useful in reducing the capacity of the energy storage devices in homes by close to 40%