Smart Microgrids: Overview and Outlook Publications on self-organizing networked systems

The idea of changing our energy system from a hierarchical design into a set of nearly inde- pendent microgrids becomes feasible with the availability of small renewable energy generators. The smart microgrid concept comes with several challenges in research and engineering tar- geting load balancing, pricing, consumer integration and home automation. In this paper we first provide an overview on these challenges and present approaches that target the problems identified. While there exist promising algorithms for the particular field, we see a missing integration which specifically targets smart microgrids. Therefore, we propose an architec- ture that integrates the presented approaches and defines interfaces between the identified components such as generators, storage, smart and “dumb” devices.