Collaborative Intelligent Agents for Smart Energy Management

Our society is in rush to de-carbonize the contemporary energy systems to avoid catastrophic long-term climate impacts, and industry and building sectors are facing major de-carbonization processes for reduction of C0₂ emissions. The ongoing global developments have created demand for solutions enhancing energy security, affordability, and flexibility for increasing the share of renewable energy on all levels of the energy systems. In future, the demand needs to be adapted to fluctuating production in real-time with integration to power system and electricity markets. The major problem to be addressed is to enable scalable, intelligent and automated energy flexibility management on all system levels, for easy uptake to energy markets, with new business models and fair renumeration of value for stakeholders enabling and participating energy flexibility actions. This requires digitalization and automation of existing mainly analogical and manually operated energy management processes and systems. Energy management needs to become a highly automated continuous activity to achieve the net-zero targets set for industrial and building sector energy consumption. Harnessing digital data and AI for automation of energy management systems enables forecasting, optimization, coordination and intelligent control for flexible energy production, consumption and energy security at industrial sites and buildings. The CIASEM project lead by VTT, in co-operation with 14 Finnish companies, will co-innovate and demonstrate a value co-creation driven automated multi-agent system enabling collaborative energy flexibility between energy users, energy distributors and energy market players, with a fair renumeration of value between the involved stakeholders via new business models.

Project background & motivation:
- Our society's energy usage doesn’t match with the available renewable energy production in real-time, which is causing volatile and increasing energy costs and CO2 emissions.
- Need for energy flexibility is increasing due to systemic transition towards fluctuating renewable energy production.
- The energy flexibility potential of real estate has not been widely aggregated and connected to energy markets or energy networks control.
- The global markets for digital and AI –based solutions for energy management of real estate are growing and estimated to reach over 40 billion USD by 2034.

Project research question:
- How to enable fair, collaborative and flexible energy management in real estate to decrease energy costs, cost variation and CO2 emissions?

Project mission:
- To co-innovate and demonstrate a value co-creation driven highly automated multi-agent system, which
enables energy flexibility between energy users, energy distributors and energy market players,
with a fair renumeration between the involved stakeholders via new business models.

Project goal:
- Driven by use cases the goal is to specify, design, develop, demonstrate, and evaluate a novel CIASEM multi-agent system for electricity markets and grid control connected aggregated energy flexibility of real estate. The use cases addressed are 1) Flexible site-level energy management, 2) Cross-sector district energy management, and 3) Flexibility aggregation for multi-market integration.

The expected results and R&D themes include:
- CIASEM Multi-agent system for collaborative energy flexibility, and related:
- Scalable business models, user interaction, and architectures.
- Artificial intelligence and edge computing.
- Interoperability and data management.
- Seamless flow of flexibility towards multiple markets
- Prototypes, demonstrations and evaluation of decreased energy costs and CO2 emissions
- Open-source contributions
- Scalability and impact analysis
- Scientific publications