A novel multi-agent system utilizing quantum-inspired evolution for demand side management in the future smart grid

The Smart Grid has become the future choice by many utility departments to attain bottom line goals of energy management. The Smart Grid will depend on a large number of renewable energy resources which require sophisticated control and coordination mechanisms for efficient and reliable demand side management (DSM). In this paper, we propose a multi-agent based system to control and coordinate the operation among different entities within the Smart Grid. Specifically, the agents autonomously coordinate their activities to satisfy the local constraints of different entities while at the same time satisfying the underlying global goal of energy management. The novelty of our system is in formulating the coordination problem among the agents as a multi-objective optimization problem solved by a quantum-inspired evolution algorithm. We have extensively evaluated the system using the JIAC-V multi-agent platform. Experimental results show that our system is feasible and effective. Our method of coordinating the energy consumption of consumers using controller agents provides the basis for energy management at peak times. Thus, it promotes the wide application of the proposed system.