Coordination of Many Agents in a Power System

Author’s note: This was the start of my serious research at MIT, and the technical start for some of my later work with power systems. I’d written this during the summer of 2018. (I was watching the 2018 FIFA world cup pretty religiously so it’s amazing I got any work done). This was written primarily for myself, and for my supervisor at the time, Dr. Peter Fisher¹ who was interested in the interactions between electric vehicles and charging stations. That said, this paper is not a reviewed conference/journal paper, rather, it’s the amalgamation of a lot of disparate, personal thoughts/assumptions with pen and paper (keyboard and computer screen?). It’s admitedly unfinished and unfocused.

There’s also a small multi-agent system demonstration I developed in Python using osBrain, here’s the repo (careful, it’s not well documented).

From the abstract: I present a model of negotiation between autonomous agents in the context of the US electric grid. The model describes the interaction protocols employed by agents to reach agreements concerning price, contract duration, and time-of-delivery. I go on to describe the strategies and tactics used to evaluate proposals and present counter proposals.

I’d like to add that there’s a lot more to the paper than what’s intimated by that abstract, which clearly wasn’t revisited as I was writing the paper.