Design of a Multi-agent System for Personalized Service in the Smart Grid*

Jinhee Ko1, In-Hye Shin1,**, Gyung-Leen Park1, Ho-Yong Kwak2, and Khi-Jung Ahn2
Department of Computer Science and Statistics 2 Department of Computer Engineering Jeju National University, Jeju, Korea littletomato7942@hotmail.com, {ihshin76,glpark,kwak,kjahn}@jejunu.ac.kr
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Abstract. This paper designs a multi-agent system capable of providing personalized services in the smart grid, defining the relevant agent modules. The proposed system provides electricity consumers with personalized power purchase recommendation. Our framework consists of four agents and seven object categories. For the operation center which manages and controls the whole system, an adaptive agent, a coordination agent, and a filtering agent are defined, while a consumer agent is define for each home to collect the history of power consumption. Based on the analysis of the consumer, power market, residence, power consumption, appliance, family member, and electric vehicle objects, those agents autonomously cooperate to provide a personalized power service to each smart grid entity. In addition, adaptive learning capability further improves the recommendation quality.

1 Introduction
The Smart Grid combines the traditional power system and the information and communication technology, or ICT. It will be characterized by the bidirectional flow of electricity and information to create an automated and widely distributed energy delivery network [1]. The smart grid brings many benefits such as energy saving by real-time pricing and efficient energy management. In addition, it can accelerate the deployment of electric vehicles and renewable energy which can significantly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions [2]. After all, this technology can cope with high oil prices and global climate changes. The Smart Grid provides a new paradigm of the power industry and a next-generation power environment, having diverse forms to achieve the given system goals. It enables self-healing, consumer participation, attack resistant, providing high quality power, optimizing assets and operating efficiently.
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This research was supported by the MKC Korea, under the ITRC support program supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion Agency) (NIPA-2010-(C1090-1011-0009)). This research was also supported by the MKE (Ministry of Knowledge Economy) through the project of Region technical renovation, Korea. ** Corresponding author.
T.-h. Kim, A. Stoica, and R.-S. Chang (Eds.): SUComS 2010, CCIS 78, pp. 267273, 2010. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010

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The national government of the Republic of Korea defined the national roadmap for the smart grid in January, 2010, aiming at building the worlds first nation-wide smart grid system by 2030. As a preliminary step for the enterprise, the national government opened the Jeju smart grid complex which covers all key technologies belonging to the smart grid. Currently, 12 consortiums consist of 171 companies are participating in the enterprise, categorized into 5 groups of the smart power network, the smart power market, the smart grid consumer, smart transportation, and smart renewable energy [4]. In the mean time, in the future, smart grid will integrate a sophisticated personalization service which is commonly used in the recommender system for tour, movies, and books. This service can also recommend a smart energy activity, namely, generation and consumption, to the individuals according to their personalities, taking into account the diverse electricity pricing policy and energy management automation system. In this regard, this paper is to propose an autonomous and active personalization service in the smart grid based on a multi-agent system, where more than one agent cooperatively solves a given complex problem. The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces the personalization and the multi-agent system, discussing related work in the smart grid. Section 3 proposes multi-agent system architecture for the personalized service in the smart grid. Finally, Section 4 summarizes and concludes this paper.

2 Related Work
2.1 Personalization and the Multi-agent System Personalization means offering goods, services, or related information to each customer based on his personal characteristics. The basic goal of the personalized system is to offer a service that customers may want or need even though they didnt ask or choose it [5]. The methods of personalization include rule-based filtering, collaboration filtering, learning agent, and content-based filtering, while some schemes can be combined to create a hybrid method. Rule-based filtering is the most basic and general personalization scheme, which creates a user profile by asking users on their personalities, interests, and preferences. However, it takes quite a long time to obtain a reasonable answer, as this scheme needs a lot of preference data. Collaboration filtering autonomously estimates the users concern or interest based on the taste information obtained from the sufficient number of users. This scheme relies on the assumption that the users interest in the past will not greatly change in the future. Its main characteristic lies in that the taste information is collected not from the specific user groups but from many others. The learning agent observes users activities on the web, decides which subject the user is interested in, and finally provides the recommendation to the user. This scheme requires that the predefined metadata be stored in the database. Content filtering is the technique whereby content is blocked or allowed based on the analysis result of its content, rather than its source or other criteria. It is most widely used on the Internet to filter e-mail and web access [6].

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It is also possible to request too much information from users. In this case, users may refuse to provide the information or sometimes answers meaningless data, creating a great amount of garbage. The multi-agent system can solve this problem, as it actively collects the user information and adaptively analyzes the information. The agent system automatically handles the work needed by users. Moreover, the multiagent system is a conglomerate of agent systems. The cooperation of multi-agent solves complicated problems, which cannot be solved by a single agent [7]. 2.2 The Smart Grid As shown in Figure 1, the smart grid delivers electricity from power providers to consumers using the digital technology, enabling the devices to communicate with the operation system. The operation system plays a role of the broker between consumers and providers, performs monitor-and-control functions, and analyzes the collected data. Many governments, looking for ways to improve energy efficiency to overcome global warming issues, seriously take into account these electricity networks. A smart grid network will also give consumers more choices, for example, enabling them to pay different rates for difference appliances. We can also introduce different electricity rates for power generated from green technology such as wind and solar power generators. Moreover, advanced smart meters can establish a network capable of informing people of when it is cheapest to use electricity. It is estimated that household electricity bills could be cut by around 15 percents [1,4].

Fig. 1. Data flow in the smart grid

By way of the bidirectional interaction with consumers, the operation center can collect the diverse usage patterns of respective consumers, making it possible to provide a personalized recommendation service and an efficient power network

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management. For example, the peak power load can be forecasted and mitigated by the power consumption pattern analysis. For the consumer side, he can provide his profile and power consumption history in real-time, optimize the power consumption, and finally select the pricing policy advantageous to his consumption pattern.

3 The Proposed System

3.1 The Multi-agent System Structure Our system consists of 4 agents and 7 object categories as shown in Figure 2. To begin with, the consumer agent, created for each home, collects the profile and power usage history in its database. The power communication network delivers the data monitored by the consumer agent to the operation center, which improves the power network efficiency by analyzing the power load, production, and consumption. Agents in the operation center autonomously cooperate with one another by the coordination agent.

Fig. 2. The proposed multi-agent system architecture

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3.2 Operation Center 3 agents and 2 object categories are defined for the operation center. First, the coordinator agent opens a communication interface for consumer agents in their own homes. Every message is distributed by this agent to the appropriate server or agent. Second, the filtering agent selects the specific data set according to the given filtering strategy. For example, for the new subscriber, the agent searches the user profile and the power consumption history out of existing subscribers having the reasonable level of similarity with the new subscriber. Based on the power consumption pattern of those similar subscribers, the filtering agent recommends an appropriate service to the new comer and guides a battery-charging schedule. As contrast, for the existing subscribers, the content-based filtering scheme is basically exploited, giving a cross recommendation using the collaborative filtering strategy which takes into account the power usage pattern of other consumers. In addition, the learning agent can enhance the recommendation quality by tuning the relevant parameters based on the feedback from the customer on the current recommendation. The data generated at the filtering agent are transferred to the adaptive and consumer agents. The adaptive agent modifies the information in the object base according to the data received from the filtering agent. Here, the reinforcement learning mechanism, specifically, the Q-learning algorithm, keeps updating the weight for the data associated with each agent. For this purpose, this agent defines a weight evaluation function to optimize the recommendation from each agent. 3.3 Home An agent and 5 object categories are defined for homes. The consumer agent monitors the power usage pattern in each home for the sake of responsive and accurate power control, collecting the real-time data on user profile, current appliance power consumption, and the charge rate for electric vehicles. The collected data are stored in the home database and will be transmitted to the operation center. The home agent can trigger the data analysis on the consumer and the power market in the operation center, when it discovers that a new consumption policy is necessary. The coordination agent delivers the analysis results obtained from all agents in the operation center to the consumer agent. Based on those results, the later controls power consumption of electrical appliances, recommends the personalized power service to the consumer, and so on. 3.4 Data Classification 2 and 6 object categories are defined in the database for the operation center and homes as shown in Figure 3 and Figure 4, respectively. First, the operation center object includes consumer and power market objects which mainly cover home profiles, power usage pattern, and power consumption history. Additionally, hourly, daily, and seasonal power load, current power supply and consumption status, and the like are belonging to this object category. Next, the home object includes the residence type, battery capacity, members, power features of electronic appliances, and the electric vehicle profile. This object also covers the hourly, daily, and monthly power load dynamics obtained from monitoring of the consumer agent.

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Fig. 3. Object base for the operation center

Fig. 4. Object base for home

4 Conclusion
This paper has designed a multi-agent system capable of providing personalized services in the smart grid, after defining the relevant agent modules. The proposed system can adapt to the change in the customer characteristics and in the environmental condition. In our design, the operation center includes a coordination agent, a filtering agent, and an adaptive agent along with 2 object categories. As contrast, a consumer agent and 5 object categories are defined for each of homes. Noticeably, agents monitor the power network to collect the usage pattern and other power related data. Then, they recommend an efficient and system-specific power service by the cooperative analysis on the power operation and available services. As a result, it is expected that our analysis model can provide an efficient guideline or recommendation to consumers, provides, and service developers. As future work, we are first planning to assess our design by implementing the prototype and then develop a mobile interface with the corresponding web service.

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