A multi-agent system approach to exploit demand-side flexibility in an energy community

Energy communities are gaining momentum at the European level as promoters of local and decentralized energy generation, storage, management and trading. Research around these initiatives has been mostly focused on the residential sector. However, communities' self-sufficiency can be further enhanced by synergistically exploiting the demand flexibility of non-residential users. This paper proposes a multiagent system approach in which optimization methods are embedded into the agents' architecture to operationalize how energy communities can benefit from having members with different and complementary energy consumption/management profiles. Community self-sufficiency is analyzed in different scenarios and the economic benefits to different community members are presented.