A Heuristic to Create Prosumer Community Groups in the Social Internet of Energy

Abstract

Contrary to the rapid evolution experienced in the last decade of Information andCommunication Technologies and particularly the Internet of Things, electric power distributionsystems have remained exceptionally steady for a long time. Energy users are no longer passive actors;the prosumer is expected to be the primary agent in the Future Grid. Demand Side Managementrefers to the management of energy production and consumption at the demand side, and there seemsto be an increasing concern about the scalability of Demand Side Management services. The creationof prosumer communities leveraging the Smart Grid to improve energy production and consumptionpatterns has been proposed in the literature, and several works concerned with scalability of DemandSide Management services group prosumers to improve Demand Side Management scalability. In ourprevious work, we coin the term Social Internet of Energy to refer to the integration between devices, prosumers and groups of prosumers via social relationships. In this work, we develop an algorithm tocoordinate the different clusters we create using the clustering method by load profile compatibility (instead of similarity). Our objective is to explore the possibilities of the cluster-by-compatibilityheuristic we proposed in our previous work. We perform experiments using synthetic and realdatasets. Results show that we can obtain a global reduction in Peak-to-Average Ratio with datasetscontaining up to 200 prosumers and creating up to 6 Prosumer Community Groups, and implythat those Prosumer Community Groups can perform load rescheduling semi-autonomously and inparallel with each other.