Decentralised stable coalition formation among energy consumers in the smart grid (demonstration)

The vision of the Smart Grid includes demand-side peak shaving strategies, such as real-time pricing or profile’s based tariffs, to encourage consumption such that the peaks on demand are flattened. Up to date, most works along this line focused on optimising via scheduling of home appliances or micro-storage the individual user consumption. Alternatively, in this demonstration we propose to exploit the consumers social side by allowing them to self-organise into coalitions of energy users with complementary needs. To this ends, we present an agent-based Java simulation of a social network of energy consumers (based on the domestic electricity market and usage patterns of homes in the UK) that uses to converge to stable energy coalitions.