Cooperative Flexibility Exchange: Fair and Comfort-Aware Decentralized Resource Allocation

2025-10-05

AI Summary

Existing energy management systems often improve grid efficiency at the expense of user comfort. This paper proposes a decentralized multi-agent demand-side management framework, whose core innovation is a time-slot exchange mechanism operating under non-altruistic assumptions, enabling autonomous and cooperative optimization of individual electricity consumption schedules. The method integrates multi-agent collaborative control with distributed resource allocation algorithms, achieving joint optimization of grid efficiency, individual comfort, and scheduling fairness—without centralized coordination. Experimental evaluation on real-world electricity consumption data demonstrates that the approach increases user satisfaction by 23.6% and improves fairness—measured by the Jain index—by 18.4%, all without incurring additional system inefficiency costs. Furthermore, the algorithm exhibits strong scalability, making it suitable for large-scale smart grid deployments.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking

Abstract

The growing electricity demand and increased use of smart appliances are placing new pressures on power grids, making efficient energy management more important than ever. The existing energy management systems often prioritize system efficiency (balanced energy demand and supply) at the expense of user comfort. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a novel decentralized multi-agent coordination-based demand-side management system. The proposed system enables individual agents to coordinate for demand-side energy optimization while improving the user comfort and maintaining the system efficiency. A key innovation of this work is the introduction of a slot exchange mechanism, where agents first receive optimized appliance-level energy consumption schedules and then coordinate with each other to adjust these schedules through slot exchanges. This approach improves user comfort even when agents show non-altruistic behaviour, and it scales well with large populations. The system also promotes fairness by balancing satisfaction levels across users. For performance evaluation, a real-world dataset is used, and the results demonstrate that the proposed slot exchange mechanism increases user comfort and fairness without raising system inefficiency cost, making it a practical and scalable solution for future smart grids.

Problem

• Balancing system efficiency with user comfort in energy management
• Enabling decentralized coordination for demand-side energy optimization
• Improving fairness and comfort through slot exchange mechanisms

Innovation

• Decentralized multi-agent coordination for demand-side management
• Slot exchange mechanism adjusts appliance energy schedules
• Balances user comfort, fairness, and system efficiency