A Distributed Electricity Trading System in Active Distribution Networks Based on Multi-Agent Coalition and Blockchain

TLDR

Distributed energy resources have spurred the emergence of prosumers—entities that both produce and consume electricity. The study proposes a distributed electricity trading system to enable peer‑to‑peer sharing among prosumers. The system uses a two‑layer architecture: a multi‑agent coalition mechanism for prosumer negotiation and a blockchain‑based settlement layer, validated through Java‑agent simulations.

Abstract

The prevalence of distributed energy resources encourages the concept of an electricity "Prosumer (Producer and Consumer)". This paper proposes a distributed electricity trading system to facilitate the peer-to-peer electricity sharing among prosumers. The proposed system includes two layers. In the first layer, a multi-agent system is designed to support the prosumer network, and an agent coalition mechanism is proposed to enable the prosumers to form coalitions and negotiate electricity trading. In the second layer, a Blockchain based transaction settlement mechanism is proposed to enable the trusted and secure settlement of electricity trading transactions formed in the first layer. Simulations are conducted based on the java agent development environment to validate the proposed electricity trading process.