Communication overlay for communities of collaborative agents in smart grid domains

The increasing demand for energy has stimulated the formulation of plans aiming at shifting to renewable energies, not only to save money, but also for the responsibility that the present population has towards future generations. Under this aspect, ICT-based solutions can be used to enable energy and money saving not only for a single building, but for the whole community of a neighbourhood. In this paper, we present an agent-based framework that allows the management and negotiation of decentralised energy production. We propose a P2P overlay network whereby the agents distributed within the community can negotiate the energy in a transparent way with respect to the different technologies used, thus, ensuring scalability of the overall architecture. We analyse the performance of the proposed solution in different scenarios by using a set of testbeds developed to evaluate the prototypal implementation of the framework and of the communication network.