Social Internet of Energy—A New Paradigm for Demand Side Management

A Heuristic to Create Prosumer Community Groups in the Social Internet of Energy

“…Therefore, society is increasing the adoption of renewable energy sources [ 4 ]. The Smart Grid (SG) refers to the addition of ICT infrastructure to the electrical domain (and the traditional electricity grid), and enables new services and opportunities that are guiding a revolution in the energy field [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ].…”

“…There seems to be an increasing concern about the scalability of DSM services [ 10 , 11 ]. To tackle such challenge, we envision a synergy between SIoT [ 12 ] and SGs, and, in our previous work [ 8 ], we coined the term Social Internet of Energy (SIoE) to refer to this union. Instead of focusing on concrete DSM algorithms, our focus is on characterizing a social network of prosumers and their smart devices and appliances.…”

“…According to a generational analysis of the IoT [ 2 ], the SIoT [ 12 , 15 ] belongs to the third and most recent generation of IoT frameworks. The SIoT envisages interactions between humans and machines, in addition to human-to-human and machine-to-machine interactions; the former enabled by Social Network Services (SNSs), and the latter approached by the IoT [ 8 ]. In the future SIoT, nodes of the same network represent humans and devices that provide services [ 16 ]—they are not logically separated.…”

“…On [ 8 ], we described the kind of SIoT relationships devices and owners need to establish to create a network of prosumers and PCGs. To group prosumers, we need a heuristic based on the attributes of prosumers, one of these attributes is their energy-consumption behavior.…”

“…Therefore, in this work, we develop an algorithm to coordinate the different clusters we create using the clustering method by prosumer compatibility (which we describe in [ 8 ], and summarize in Section 4.2 ). We consider a simple load model, similar to the one the authors in [ 17 , 18 ] use that includes fixed and time-shiftable loads.…”