Multi-agent-based decentralized residential energy management using Deep Reinforcement Learning

In smart grid, energy consumption has grown exponentially in residential houses, which necessitates the adoption of demand response management. To alleviate and handle the energy management in residential houses, an efficient residential energy management (REM) system can be employed to regulate the energy consumption of appliances for several energy loads such as non-shiftable, shiftable, and controllable loads. Many researchers have focused on the REM using machine learning and deep learning techniques which is not able to provide secure and optimal energy management procedure. Thus, in this paper, a multi-agent-based decentralized REM, i.e., MD-REM approach is proposed using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) with the utilization of blockchain. Furthermore, The combinatorial model DQN, i.e., Q-learning and deep neural network (DNN) is employed, to gain the optimal price based on the reduced energy consumption by appliances associated with different energy loads utilizing the Markov Decision Process (MDP). Here, multiple agents are designed to handle different energy loads and consumption is controlled by the DQN agent, then reduced consumption data is securely shared among all stakeholders using blockchain-based smart contract. The performance evaluation of the proposed MD-REM approach seems to be efficient in terms of reduced energy consumption, optimal energy price, reward, and total profit analysis. Moreover, blockchain-based result is evaluated for the proposed MD-REM approach considering the performance metrics such as transaction efficiency, Interplanetary File System (IPFS) bandwidth utilization, and data storage cost comparison.