Planning community energy system in the industry 4.0 era: Achievements, challenges and a potential solution

Abstract

Many industries have undergone a transformation in today's highly developed information technology era. In this study, we descript a future community energy system perspective based on the principle of industry 4.0 and a literature review of current research achievements on community energy system planning (CESP) After a review, we indicate that information sharing, consumer's participation, and cross-business cooperation are the noteworthy features of CESP in the industry 4.0 era. We also indicate that future CESP is based on stakeholders' deep participation and that decentralised independent decision-making is the main planning pattern. The lack of hierarchical and parallel information interaction between different stakeholders at the planning stage makes CESP inefficient and an investment waste. Furthermore, the basic data utilised by CESP have the potential to be supplemented.After discussing about the future community energy system, we recognise that CESP is not a final blueprint of community energy system, and should offer an interest-coordination mechanism and information exchange platform for community energy stakeholders. Moreover, CESP does not provide an overall solution for economic and technical problems related to the community energy system but provides a communication platform and regulations for stakeholders. In this work, we propose an information interactive platform structure based on a multi-agent system model for CESP process, which is a modularised and open system to improve the systematisms of multitudinous energy systems planned by different proprietors.