A. Angelidakis, G. Chalkiadakis .(2015, May) .Factored MDPS for Optimal prosumer Decision-Making.Presented at the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.[online]. Available: http://www.aamas2015.com/en/AAMAS_2015_USB/aamas/p503.pdf
Tackling the decision-making problem faced by a prosumer (i.e., a producer that is simultaneously a consumer) when selling and buying energy in the emerging smart electricity grid, is of utmost importance for the economic profitability of such a business entity. In this paper, we model, for the first time, this problem as a factored Markov Decision Process. By so doing, we are able to represent the problem compactly, and provide an exact optimal solution via dynamic programming - notwithstanding its large size. Our model successfully captures the main aspects of the business decisions of a prosumer corresponding to a community microgrid of any size. Moreover, it includes appropriate sub-models for prosumer production and consumption prediction. Experimental simulations verify the effectiveness of our approach; and show that our exact value iteration solution matches that of a state-of-the-art method for stochastic planning in very large environments, while outperforming it in terms of computation time.