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The electrical power industry was traditionally heavily regulated with a lack of market-price mechanisms. Owing to new regulations, it has evolved into a distributed and competitive industry in which market forces drive energy prices. Electricity markets are not only a new reality but also an evolving one, meaning that researchers lack insight into numerous open problems that are being raised. Chief among these is the need of new market designs and models to integrate variable renewable energy and emerging technologies, such as distributed generation, smart grids, demand response, storage and electrical vehicles.
After the explicit commitment of many countries to support the installation and management of renewable energy production sources, the current energy grids need to be upgraded to a much more intelligent and flexible grid. Such so called smart grids most likely need to rely on decentralized control and a highly efficient, fast, flexible and reliable management. This requires smart grids to be capable of autonomously and intelligently configuring themselves to make the most efficient use of available resources, to be robust to all kinds of failures and energy production deviations, and to be extendable and adaptable in the face of rapidly changing technologies and requirements.
The distributed nature of all these systems, and the autonomous behaviour expected for them, points towards software agents and multi-agent systems as a foundation for their realisation and deployment. Accordingly, the focus of this workshop is on the application of software agents and multi-agent systems to electricity markets for integrating variable renewable energy and emerging technologies, such as distributed generation, smart grids, demand response, storage, smart homes and electrical vehicles.