IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014 - 45

investigate four of the socio-technical challenges of managing prosumers in prosumer community groups:

How to Define The
Prosumer Community Group
Membership Categories and
the Pre-Qualification Criteria
This issue becomes apparent in
the very first stage of the prosumer community group formation.
The first stage involves defining
the prosumer community groups
and their associated prequalification criteria, which the prosumers
should comply with in order to
obtain the membership. proposals
that address this challenge should
consider the variable nature of the
prosumers' energy sharing behaviors throughout the year, in order
to define the optimal community
groups and associated prequalification criteria.

How to Recruit Dynamic
Prosumers to the Prosumer
Community Groups
This issue emerges while recruiting
new prosumers to the appropriate
prosumer community groups. Due
to the huge diversity in prosumer
profiles over time, differentiating
active prosumers from the passive
prosumers may be complicated.
Thus, it would be a short-sighted
to decide a prosumer's stability
in the energy sharing process by
observing a single energy transaction. For instance, a prosumer who
exceeds the energy expectation in
one energy transaction may fail to
do that in subsequent energy transactions. Therefore, before recruiting
new prosumers to the community
groups, it is necessary to monitor the
prosumers' behaviors over a period
of time to see whether the desired
energy goals are being achieved.

How to Define An Optimal
Set of Mutual Goals
The community based energy sharing process comprises multiple
incommensurable objectives such
as achieving the energy demand of

customers, cost constraints, incentive maximization, etc. In many
cases, one objective may be achievable only at the expense of other

Proposals to Resolve the
Challenges
In this section, we suggest innovative proposals in order to address

The prosumer not only
consumes energy, but also
generates green energy
and shares the surplus.
objectives. Furthermore, establishing a hierarchy of importance
among incompatible objectives is
necessary, such that the achievement
of the lower order goals are considered only after the higher order goals
have been satisfied or have reached
a point beyond which no further
improvements are desirable. Overall, an effective negotiation among
the different objectives is essential
in order to define practically achievable mutual energy goals for prosumer community groups.

How to Rank the Prosumers
Based on an Assessment
Criteria for Fair Incentive
Distribution
Even in a single prosumer community group, the members may exhibit
dissimilar behaviors over the membership duration. Therefore, treating
all the members of a community
group in the same fashion may be
inequitable in certain scenarios, like
when allocating incentives. ranking
the individual members based on
relevant assessment criteria (including meeting the conditions of the
agreement, historical performance,
etc.) is necessary to achieve fair
incentive distribution.
An examination of the existing
literature clearly shows that the
managing prosumer community
groups is still in the preliminary
phases, and there has been very little attention paid for addressing the
challenges associated with these
groups. Therefore, we hereby present an aggregated set of proposals
to overcome the abovementioned
four challenges.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SprING 2014

the challenges mentioned in the
previous section.
As illustrated in Fig. 2, the first
proposal is to define different prosumer community groups by segmenting the energy sharing profiles
of the prosumers, thereby identifying the associated prequalification
criteria of each community group.
relying on the different community
groups formed on the basis of the
first proposal, the second proposal
involves recruiting the new prosumers to the appropriate community
groups. It requires a proactive evaluation of the prosumers' stability as
well as reliability in energy sharing,
before finalizing their membership
status. This is an important process
during the growth of the existing
groups. The third proposal defines
practically achievable optimal energy
goals for the prosumer community
groups, by negotiating the different conflicting objectives. This is
important to create a goal-oriented
atmosphere within the prosumer
community group. The fourth proposal identifies the influential prosumers within the community group
by ranking prosumer behaviors based
on assessment criteria. This proposal
is crucial for fair allocation of incentives to diverse members.
Each of these four processes
requires aggregation of different
effective methodologies. Fig. 3
demonstrates the proposed overall
framework representing relevant
methodologies for each proposal. As
shown in the Fig. 3, the key actor involved in the overall framework is the
prosumer community group coordinator, who can be broadly defined as
|

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014