A social relationship preference aware peer-to-peer energy market for urban energy prosumers and consumers

Increasingly prevalence of distributed energy resources (such as solar panels and wind turbines) has been transforming traditional energy consumers to become energy prosumers (producers-and-consumers). This in turn drives the development of peer-to-peer energy trading, which refers to trading energy generated by distributed energy resources directly among energy prosumers and consumers. This paper proposes a new peer-to-peer electricity market prototype that facilitates energy trading among energy prosumers and consumers with consideration of their preferences in terms of social relationships with each other. A data-driven social network model is established to represent the bilateral social relationships of the market participants. Based on that, an auction-based electricity trading mechanism is proposed to facilitate the participants to make end-to-end energy trading decisions by simultaneously considering energy trading prices and social relationship preferences. Numerical simulations based on real-world datasets are conducted to validate the proposed system.