Development and real-world deployment of a multi-agent system to support the operation of renewable energy communities
João Tabanêz Patrício, Tiago Lopes, André Dionísio Rocha, João Francisco Martins, Rui Amaral Lopes · Energy Reports · 2026
Despite the ongoing measures to support the development of Renewable Energy Communities (RECs), effectively managing energy production, consumption, and sharing, while balancing members’ needs, remains a major challenge. This paper presents a Multi-Agent System-based Community Energy Management System, designed to manage interactions and real-time energy exchanges within a REC to tackle the referred challenge in line with European legislation. The developed system has been deployed in real-world conditions considering a REC located in Portugal, unlike previous studies that rely on simulation. Additionally, the energy flexibility provided by second-life batteries has been controlled by the system to improve self-consumption of local generation and increase benefits of energy sharing in different scenarios. The real-world case study revealed that the developed system demonstrated effective operation, including emergency procedures to prevent deep discharge of batteries. The collected results also show that collective self-consumption with dynamic sharing coefficients is the most interesting REC configuration in terms of global cost savings, reducing energy bills by 25–28 % and 20–24 % when comparing to scenarios where individual self-consumption with fixed and dynamic sharing coefficients are applied, respectively.