Period: summer term 2013 and winter term 2013/14

Vision

The Department of Environmental Informatics at the University of Oldenburg is working in various research projects on an automated and programme-controlled solution to these problems. The focus here is on intelligent power grids (smart grids), which are implemented with the help of multi-agent systems. Each agent represents a system and has extensive status information and, if necessary, regulatory powers. The operation of a plant is specified for a future time horizon in the form of a schedule, whereby the schedules of all plants in a virtual power plant result in a deployment plan. Research results from the Environmental Informatics department present a way of calculating schedules that are optimised for the current situation. Plant load profiles are planned in such a way that they avoid consumption extremes by shifting loads over time if possible. To do this, a search space of possible schedules is first set up for each plant, which only contains all operational schedules and can select one suitable for the situation at hand on request - using a decoder. On this basis, the task of a planning algorithm is to negotiate the operating schedule between the systems for a future time horizon. The present research uses the distributed and easily scalable algorithm COHDA, in which agents only communicate with each other via directly defined neighbourhood relationships. Negotiations are primarily used for the initial determination of a deployment plan. Within this work, however, it is also used to renegotiate deployment plans from the perspective of a network similarity analysis in the event of unexpected deviations from schedules.

The Interactive Energy Wonderland (InEWola) project group takes on the task of creating a suitable visualisation tool that explains the tasks and functions of the research approaches provided in an understandable way. With this in mind, it is developing an interactive demonstrator in the form of a table, which is intended to contribute to understanding through appealing interaction options and intuitive visualisations. Users should recognise the added value of the distributed algorithms and be made aware of the possibilities of the developed search space model. The development is supported in this respect by human-centred design processes such as group discussions and user studies to ensure the usability of the demonstrator.

The result of the InEWola project group is documented in the following video.