In this project a Market-driven management of distributed, micro storage devices is simulated where there are three types of agents. The generator agents (GA), load agents (LA) and directory facilitator agents (DF). The generator agents (GA) advertise their distributed energy resources (DER) to the DF agent while the load agents (LA) find out the lowest price energy unit with the highest sustainability rating, that can be paid for the required Kilo-Watt-Hour (KWH) demand.
In the perspective of multi-agent organization and development, our task is to develop a multi-agent based distributed power grid. In this distributed Grid there are two parties, people who look for energy known as 'Load Agents' and the energy providers that sell power to the distributed grid known as the 'Generator Agents'. There can be any number of load agents (LA) and generator agents (GA) at any given time in the distributed power grid. There will be 5 different types of power, each one bearing different cost and sustainability ratings, that the Generator Agents will sell to the market. These will be
- Solar
- Hydel
- Wind
- Fuel cells
- Nuclear The Generator agents will be able to add new power sources if they are available to their dispense or remove a source if it goes out of order. More Load agents and Generator Agents can be added to the JADE platform at any time to emulate the real life systematic working of the distributed Grid. Generator Agents (GA) register with Directory Facilitator (DF) agent right after creation and Load Agents (LA) always update their generator agent list by querying the Directory Facilitator (DF) agent. As the source or consumer human we specify some criteria to the Load agent such as
- Type of Power
- Max price per KWH
- Max number of generators to query Load Agents send query to Generator Agents, collect the results and analyses them to decide the best choice of power to buy. Then initiates byt buying process and finally buys the power with minimum cost and highest sustainability power rating.
Agent communication We start by describing the agents communication in our project. Within Jade, agents can communicate transparently regardless of whether they live in the same container, in different containers (in the same or in different hosts) belonging to the same platform or in different platforms. Communication is based on an asynchronous message passing paradigm. Message format is defined by the ACL language defined by FIPA, an international organization that issued a set of specifications for agent interoperability. An ACL Message contains a number of fields including
- The sender
- The receiver(s)
- The communicative act
โฆ (also called performative) that represents the intention of the sender of the message. For instance when an agent sends an IN sends a REQUEST message it wishes the receiver(s) to perform an action. FIPA defined 22 communicative acts, each one with a well defined semantics, that ACL gurus assert can cover more than 95% of all possible situations. Fortunately in 99% of the cases we don't need to care about the formal semantics behind Communicative acts and we just use them for their intuitive meaning. 4. The content i.e. the actual information conveyed by the message (the fact the receiver should become aware of in case of an INFORM message, the action that the receiver is expected to perform in case of a REQUEST message) following is a sequence diagram as shown in figure 4, of the agent communication sequence between the Load Agent, Generator Agent and Directory Facilitator agent. The sequence diagram is described in the following steps
- The generator agents first registers itself with the directory facilitator as soon as it is alive.
- The DF agent serves as a yellow papers directory for the load agent and provides them with information about all the generator agents.
- The load agents doesn't hold knowledge about the generator agents and thus looks for the DF agent for power providers.
- The load agents, after having list of all the GAs, will start communicating with generator agents based on the search criteria
- After receiving details from all GAs the load agents will decide which vendor to buy from
- After deciding, the load agents will contact specific generator agent to make the purchase.