Smart Grid Architectures and the Multi-Agent System Paradigm
Abstract
Currently, coal-, gas-, oil and nuclear power plants are used to meet the ever increasing energy demand. Nevertheless, due to an increasing environmental awareness and entailing regulations, energy prices rise considerably. As for today, many companies try to facilitate the production and utilization of much the cheaper energy from renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar energy. However, due to constructional deficiencies, today grid infrastructures comprehend only a small amount of renewable energy sources. To counter this problem, sophisticated control applications were designed, deciding on when and where to procure energy and safeguarding the stability of the entire grid architecture. Over the last years we have developed many smart grid applications and---due to the distributed nature of the problem solving task---we always applied multi-agent technology for this purpose. In this paper we present our experiences in using the JIAC framework. JIAC innately provides many features that are indispensably required for smart grid applications, as such; it is our experience that the framework is most suitable for the development of those.