The Need for Equitable Coordination in Multi-agent Power Systems

Increasing penetration of distributed energy resources is fueling the evolution of our centralized electric grid to a multi-agent system. System-level performance of multi-agent networks greatly depends on the communication and computational capabilities of nodes (customers). The equitable representation of customers with limited access to communication bandwidth (e.g., caused by sporadic internet access) or computational power (e.g., due to the age of their device) is not well-understood. To this end, this paper investigates equity in the context of multi-agent power systems and showcases the adverse impacts of overlooking struggling nodes. The case studies leverage the ${Consensus}+ {Innovations}$ approach to simulate the behavior of a multi-agent power system.