Synergychain: blockchain-assisted adaptive cyber-physical p2p energy trading

Abstract

Industrial investments into distributed energy resource technologies are increasing and playing a pivotal role in the global transactive energy, as part of a wider drive to provide a clean and stable source of energy. The management of prosumers, which consume and as well as generate energy, with heterogeneous energy sources is critical for sustainable and efficient energy trading procedures. This article proposes a blockchain-assisted adaptive model, namely SynergyChain, for improving the scalability and decentralization of the prosumer grouping mechanism in the context of peer-to-peer energy trading. Smart contracts are used for storing the transaction information and for the creation of the prosumer groups. SynergyChain integrates a reinforcement learning module to further improve the overall system performance and profitability by creating a self-adaptive grouping technique. The proposed SynergyChain is developed using Python and Solidity and has been tested using Ethereum test nets. The comprehensive analysis using the hourly energy consumption dataset shows a 39.7% improvement in the performance and scalability of the system as compared to the centralized systems. The evaluation results confirm that SynergyChain can reduce the request completion time along with an 18.3% improvement in the overall profitability of the system as compared to its counterparts.