IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014 - 48

identified in each evaluation in the
proactive evaluation process (evaluation period). Further, the simulation
results of the proposal 3 (mutual goal
definition) demonstrates that one
goal is achievable only at the expense
of other goals, thus requiring alteration of target values in order to ensure
the satisfactory level of attainment of
all the goals. Moreover, the simulation results of the proposal 4 (ranking
of members of prosumer community groups) demonstrates that the
proposed ranking framework, which
assesses the prosumers' performance
in multiple criteria, shows fairer
ranking than the conventional ranking method that mostly considers a
single criteria.

Benefits
Now we discuss the significance
of promoting the goal-oriented
prosumer community groups in
today's society. One of the key benefits would be that consumers can
directly buy the energy from geographically closer prosumer community groups, which will often
deliver the power they commit
to, avoiding interrupting the main
utility grid. In fact, the prosumer
community groups can fulfil consumers' long-term energy demands
more consistently than can individual prosumers. This local approach
to power distribution minimizes
energy losses as the energy travels
a shorter distance to reach the consumers while providing a higher
selling price for the prosumers.
Furthermore, a prosumer community group can be driven to fulfil
the energy demand of its own members, while disconnecting from the
main grid. This encourages local
members to limit their electricity
needs, and to go above anticipated
demand for energy production
by the overall community group,
thus eliminating electricity waste.
This is particularly advantageous
in remote areas that do not have
abundant energy resources and that
incur huge costs and difficulties
in transporting energy to satisfy
48

the energy needs of their users. In
such situations, a strong interaction
among the prosumers, consumers,
and the utility grid will induce individuals to work together to more
efficiently manage their electricity
usage. Such strategies are essential
as incentives for users to conserve
energy, and later utilize it for their
own benefit.
Furthermore,
the
prosumer
community groups are formed by
clustering the prosumers based on
homogeneity of energy sharing
behaviors. In the case that the number of clusters are higher than the
desired number of prosumer community groups, the closer clusters can be
joined together to reach the preferred
number of community groups. Then
the grid and distribution companies
can contract with these optimal number of prosumer community groups,
making the process of managing
prosumers much more efficient -
efficiencies result when the grid or
the distribution company doesn't
have to worry about interacting with
many small individual producers.
In addition, since each prosumer
community group comprises members having similar energy sharing
behaviors, disagreements among the
members are minimized, leading to
more stable groups in the long term.
Ultimately, this also results in a more
sustainable energy sharing process in
long term.
The social impact of this concept
leads to a more symmetrical interaction between community groups of
prosumers and utility companies,
since the community group has
more bargaining power than a single
consumer. Compared to an individual, being part of a bigger community group can also be seen as a big
motivator for behavioral changes
with regard to energy usage, because
the impact of a community group's
behavior can be more visible, relevant, and stronger than the impact of
individual behavior. As a result, prosumer community groups can create
a dynamic ecosystem of cooperating
prosumers in the society.

Achieving Sustainable
Energy Sharing
Goal-oriented prosumer community
groups are an ideal way to achieve a
sustainable energy sharing process.
However, the development of the
prosumer community groups is still
in the introductory phases, and there
are hardly any effective proposals
to develop this concept further. We
have investigated the key challenges
of managing prosumer community
groups, and made some innovative
proposals to overcome them. We
have evaluated the functionality of
those proposed frameworks using
prosumers' historic energy sharing
profiles (generated on the basis of
Australian conditions). In the future,
we plan to implement an ICT platform using the Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) for
prosumer community groups, allowing prosumers to virtually connect
to the suitable prosumer community
group and trade the energy in the
energy market. Ultimately, we hope
to experiment with this framework in
the Western Australia region.

Author Information
The authors are with the School
of Information Systems, Curtin
University of Technology, Suite 5,
3 Brodie Hall Drive, Technology
park (Eastern precinct), Bentley,
perth City, Western Australia, Australia 6102. Email: abekoon.rathnayaka@postgrad.curtin.edu.au.

References

[1] Y. Xinghuo, C. Cecati, T. Dillon, X. Simo,
and M.G. Es, "The new frontier of smart
grids," IEEE Industrial Electronics Mag., vol. 5,
pp. 49-63, 2011.
[2] A.J.D. rathnayaka, V.M. potdar, and S.J. Kuruppu, "Design of smart grid prosumer communities via online social networking communities,"
Int. J. Infornomics, vol. 5, pp. 544-556, 2012.
[3] M. Simonov, M. Mussetta, and r. Zich,
"Digital energy: Clustering micro grids for
socialnetworking," Int. J. Virtual Communities and Social Networking (IJVCSN), vol. 1,
pp. 75-93, 2009.
[4] A. Tsigkas, "Open lean electricity supply
communities," Energy Systems, vol. 2, pp. 407-
422, 2011/11/01 2011.
[5] p. Asmus, "Microgrids, virtual power
plants and our distributed energy future," The
Electricity J., vol. 23, pp. 72-82, 2010.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SprING 2014

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