Meeting the challenge of mitigating the worst effects of global climate change, and ensuring energy security in the face of dwindling oil and gas reserves, requires a radical change in the way in which energy (and particularly electricity) is generated, distributed and consumed.
Addressing this challenge requires future energy systems (such as the smart grid) to be capable of autonomously and intelligently configuring themselves to make the most efficient use of available resources, to be robust to the cascading failures that plague current networks, and to be extendable and adaptable in the face of rapidly changing technologies and requirements.
The distributed nature of these systems, and the autonomous behaviour expected of them, naturally lend themselves to a multi-agent methodology. Thus, the goals of this workshop are to explore and develop the application of agent technologies within such future energy systems, to attract researchers to this exciting and important application domain, and to provide a forum where domain experts and agent researchers can meet and exchange ideas.
Examples of areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Methodologies to predict and optimise of energy use within homes, buildings, organisations and micro-grids.
- Multi-agent simulation of energy markets, energy grids and consumers.
- Novel energy markets and trading strategies.
- Coalition formation strategies for coordinated energy use across multiple consumers, forming virtual power stations, and performing intelligent demand management.
- Agent/human interaction for energy preference elicitation and efficiency feedback.
- Agent-based software development for deploying distributed control across energy networks.