A Market for Reliability for Electricity Scheduling in Developing World Microgrids (Extended Abstract)

The lack of reliable electricity is one of the problems most hindering human development, aecting over 1.3 billion people worldwide. We are developing a bottom-up approach to electrication that creates a peer-to-peer electricity sharing marketplace. The electricity sharing network poses a problem in multi-agent power scheduling that is not solved by current approaches. The scheduling algorithm must be able to explicitly deal with uncertainty in generation, take into account users’ competing demands for power and reliability, and be computationally feasible for a distributed network of extremely low-cost microcontrollers. Our advancement is creating a Market for Reliability (M.f.R.) algorithm similar to tatonnement but, unlike traditional tatonnement, we explicitly price reliability. This allows us to account for uncertainty and provide users with a probabilistic guarantee on achieving their desired activities.