Enabling Moral Agency in Distributed Energy Management: An Ethics Score for Negotiations in Multi-Agent Systems

Malte Stomberg (OFFIS e. V.); Martin Tröschel (OFFIS e. V.)

Abstract

Intelligent and autonomous agents have gained increased recognition as a
solution for the efficient and reliable operation of distributed and digitalised
power systems. In multi-agent systems, agents use negotiation to coordinate
their behaviour, letting them exchange information and make informed
control decisions according to a shared goal. However, as power systems
are socio-technical systems, too, the agents’ autonomous decisions directly
or indirectly impact the welfare of human beings. Thus, the question of
moral agency arises: How can the agents’ decision-making, and the resulting
behaviour of the overall system, be aligned with moral values and ethical
principles? Unfortunately, this important question is often overlooked in the
current state of the art. In this paper, we therefore introduce an ethics score to
be used within agent-based power systems in order to enable explicit moral
agency in distributed power management. As a showcase, we extend the
multi-agent system WINZENT in such a way that all agents are able to include
the ethics score as a notion of goodness and fairness in their decision-making
without impacting the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the agent-based
control. We demonstrate the feasibility of the concept in a case study of
a future urban distribution grid modelled after the city of Bremerhaven,
Germany, and discuss strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach.