Delegating Autonomy on Digital Twins in Energy Ecosystems

The concepts of “Collaborative Virtual Power Plant Ecosystem” (CVPP-E) and “Cognitive Household Digital Twin” (CHDT) have been introduced to support sustainability and effective energy performance at the level of households within Renewable Energy Communities (RECs). In this context, a CVPP-E can be viewed as a digital twin representation of a REC. Likewise, CHDTs can also be represented by digital twins of each member household of the CVPP-E. Moreover, the CHDTs may be implemented as software agents with some level of cognitive intelligence, which allows them to perform as autonomous decision-making entities that can assume some "delegated autonomy" on behalf of the owners of the physical households. Their decisions are expected to lead to the promotion of collaborative behaviours that will increase the ecosystem’s resilience and sustainability. This work examines the scenario of a CVPP-E with prosumer CHDTs that may directly consume energy from a solar energy generation system installed in the household, from a local battery storage system, from a community battery storage, or from the power grid. The scenario also considers consumer CHDTs whose sole choices for energy consumption are the community storage and the grid. The CHDTs given some "delegation" to make decisions on energy consumption. This "delegated autonomy" is given by their physical twin (owner), which may indicate the owner's contribution to a common objective, hence enabling a collaborative approach towards sustainable energy consumption. The outcomes of the performed analysis, obtained through a multi-method simulation methodology, show the feasibility and potential utility of having CHDTs with complementary decision-making capabilities. The adequacy of the adopted modelling technique is also demonstrated.