The growing electricity demand and use of smart appliances are placing pressure on power grids, making efficient energy management more important than ever. The existing energy management systems often prioritize system efficiency (balanced energy demand and supply) at the expense of consumer comfort. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a novel decentralized multi-agent coordination-based demand-side management system. The proposed system enables individual agents to coordinate for demand-side energy optimization while improving consumer comfort and maintaining system efficiency. A key innovation of this work is the introduction of a slot exchange mechanism, where agents first receive optimized appliance-level energy consumption schedules and then coordinate with each other to adjust these schedules through slot exchanges to improve their comfort even when agents show non-altruistic behaviour. It also scales well with large populations and promotes fairness by balancing satisfaction levels across consumers. For performance evaluation, a real-world dataset is used, and the results demonstrate that the proposed slot exchange mechanism increases consumer comfort and fairness without raising system inefficiency cost, making it a practical and scalable solution for future smart grids.

翻译：日益增长的电力需求及智能家电的使用正给电网带来压力，使得高效的能源管理比以往任何时候都更加重要。现有的能源管理系统往往以牺牲用户舒适度为代价，优先考虑系统效率（平衡能源供需）。本文通过提出一种新颖的基于分散式多智能体协调的需求侧管理系统来解决这一不足。所提出的系统使各个智能体能够协调进行需求侧能源优化，同时提升用户舒适度并维持系统效率。本工作的一个关键创新是引入了时段交换机制，其中智能体首先接收优化的设备级能耗调度计划，随后相互协调，通过时段交换来调整这些计划，以提升其舒适度，即使在智能体表现出非利他行为时亦然。该系统还能很好地适应大规模用户群体，并通过平衡不同消费者的满意度水平来促进公平性。为进行性能评估，本文使用了真实世界数据集，结果表明，所提出的时段交换机制在不增加系统低效成本的前提下，提高了用户舒适度与公平性，使其成为未来智能电网的一种实用且可扩展的解决方案。