Load management through agent based coordination of flexible electricity consumers

Demand Response (DR) offers a cost-effective and carbonfriendly way of performing load balancing. DR describes a change in the electricity consumption of flexible consumers in response to the supply situation. In DR, flexible consumers may perform their own load balancing through load management (LM) mechanisms. However, the individual amount of load balancing capacity exhibited by the majority of flexible consumers is limited and as a result, coordinated LM of several flexible electricity consumers is needed in order to replace existing conventional fossil based load balancing services. In this paper, we propose an approach to perform such coordination through a Virtual Power Plant (VPP)[1]. We represent flexible electricity consumers as software agents and we solve the coordination problem through multi-objective multi-issue optimization using a mediator-based negotiation mechanism. We illustrate how we can coordinate flexible consumers through a VPP in response to external events simulating the need for load balancing services.