An architecture for a microgrid-based eco industrial park using a Multi-Agent System

With the bidirectional information and power flow provided by the Smart Grid, many new ideas are being promoted to augment and improve the energy usage in different settings. One such extension is the concept of microgrids. This paper proposes a framework and architecture for controlling the Energy Management System of a microgrid-based Eco-Industrial Park (EIP) by means of a Multi-Agent System (MAS), called AMGEM (an Architecture for a MicroGrid-based EIP using MAS). To the best of our knowledge, AMGEM is the first framework in the literature proposing a microgrid-based EIP by means of a MAS infrastructure. Potential benefits of using MAS as control mechanism are discussed throughout the paper with the previous studies on MAS applications in power engineering. Our study emphasizes on microgrid market control mechanism for both electricity and byproducts of the companies composing the EIP. Ontology of the proposed design, the MAS architecture, the Market Model and the Auction Methodology are all elaborated in the paper.