Energy market deregulation and environmental sustainability increase the need for efficiency and flexibility of energy systems. New services are sougt to ensure reliable supply, utilize the renewable energy sources (RES), and balance the costs and benefits of the involved parties. In this context, the European FP7 project MIRACLE (Micro-Request-Based Aggregation, Forecasting and Scheduling of Energy Demand, Supply and Distribution) proposes a conceptual and infrastructural approach allowing electricity distributors to manage higher amounts of renewable energy and balance supply and demand. For this purpose, MIRACLE introduces the concept of micro-requests that allow consumers and producers to specify flexibilities of their energy profiles in terms of the energy amounts and their time shifts. Such micro-requests from numerous consumers and producers will enable fine-grained scheduling of consumption and production of electricity, and maintaining a system-wide balance between demand and supply.

Work Package 5 (WP5) of the MIRACLE project deals with scheduling and negotiation in the proposed approach. Based on the forecast of energy supply and demand, negotiation will take place to determine how and when consumption and production can be matched, and a schedule for production and consumption will be determined. The goals of WP5 are to specify a framework to schedule production and consumption for the forthcoming period, specify a negotiation framework, implement and integrate the two frameworks, and validate them on real data from the project trial cases.

This deliverable is a result of the WP5 preparatory phase and reports on the state-of-the-art in scheduling and negotiation approaches. Regarding scheduling, it first presents a common type of scheduling problems together with their properties, and introduces some characteristic aspects of the scheduling domain. It then focuses on scheduling in energy sector where it identifies particular problems: generation scheduling, unit commitment and economic dispatch. Finally, it reviews methods applied in solving scheduling problems in energy sector, including deterministic and meta-heuristic techniques, and with a special attention to the approaches for deregulated markets. The state-of-the art survey on negotiation approaches starts with an introduction to negotiations and two negotiation types: bilateral contracts and auctions. Energy exchange auctions are then described with the focus on hourly bids, block bids, pricing and trading phases. Examples of multi-agent negotiation systems are then presented, taken from related projects and the literature. The report concludes with comments related to further work on both scheduling and negotiation in MIRACLE. [read more]

Authors:
Bogdan Filipič, Erik Dovgan, JSI; Alexandr Savinov, SAP