About the project
How can households, businesses and public organisations share renewable energy fairly? In this project, you'll use game theory, distributed AI and agent-based simulation to develop smart contracts that support collaboration, distribute costs and energy, and encourage participation. You'll investigate policies that make clean energy partnerships viable and sustainable.
Renewable energy is often generated close to where it is needed, yet sharing it across organisations and communities raises challenging questions. Who should collaborate, how should the costs of setting up a collaboration be shared, and how should energy and benefits be allocated as generation and demand change?
In this project, you will investigate smart contracts for fair and sustainable energy sharing. Applications may include households sharing locally generated electricity, businesses in an industrial park using energy generated by one firm’s solar panels, and collaborations involving council-owned properties and infrastructure, such as bus stops and car parks.
You'll explore how to:
- identify beneficial and stable coalitions of energy producers and users
- allocate the initial costs of establishing an energy-sharing collaboration
- design dynamic smart contracts that specify how energy, ongoing costs and benefits are shared during operation
- evaluate policies and incentives, such as subsidies or pricing mechanisms, that encourage participation and make clean energy collaborations viable
You'll draw on cooperative game theory, mechanism design, multiagent/distributed AI, mathematical optimisation and agent-based simulation. You'll develop and evaluate models that account for changing generation and demand, participant preferences, fairness and incentives to remain in a collaboration. You may also consider how contract rules support transparent and accountable decisions.
Your research will aim to produce methods and evidence to support energy communities, industrial partners and local authorities in designing effective collaborations. You may examine Power Purchase Agreements and the proposed Complex Site Classes (P441) as contractual and regulatory contexts for energy sharing.
The School of Electronics and Computer Science is committed to promoting equality, diversity inclusivity as demonstrated by our Athena SWAN award. We welcome all applicants regardless of their gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation or age, and will give full consideration to applicants seeking flexible working patterns and those who have taken a career break. The University has a generous maternity policy, onsite childcare facilities, and offers a range of benefits to help ensure employees’ well-being and work-life balance. The University of Southampton is committed to sustainability and has been awarded the Platinum EcoAward.
