Cooperative flexibility exchange: fair and comfort-aware decentralized resource allocation

Abstract The growing electricity demand and use of smart appliances are placing pressures on power grids, making efficient energy management more important than ever. The existing energy management systems often prioritize system efficiency (balanced energy demand and supply) at the expense of consumer comfort. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a novel decentralized multi-agent coordination-based demand-side management system. The proposed system enables individual agents to coordinate for demand-side energy optimization while improving the consumer comfort and maintaining the system efficiency. A key innovation of this work is the introduction of a slot exchange mechanism, where agents first receive optimized appliance-level energy consumption schedules and then coordinate with each other to adjust these schedules through slot exchanges to improve their comfort even when agents show non-altruistic behaviour. It also scales well with large populations and promotes fairness by balancing satisfaction levels across consumers. For performance evaluation, a real-world dataset is used, and the results demonstrate that the proposed slot exchange mechanism increases consumer comfort and fairness without raising system inefficiency cost, making it a practical and scalable solution for future smart grids.