Energy is a common resource that is in high demand. How to acquire and share energy is a crucial question at the heart of several major crises that Brussels is also facing. In this project, we aim to develop transferable knowledge and expertise to enable groups of households to coordinate their energy usage behaviours, based on AI proxies, that is, autonomous decision-makers selected and configured by their users to act on their behalf. These proxies execute a program that balances shared public interests (e.g., load balancing) and energy efficiency with individual interests in arbitrary access to energy. As such, they act on behalf of households in Brussels to share energy and potentially negotiate the reach of fair agreements.
Autonomous decision-makers can be a force for good here, providing a way for users to have their interests and needs met. Yet given the importance of energy for everyone in society and the need to have a level playing field, co-designing these systems with legal and social science experts is recommended, as it ensures that human rights are not violated and that citizens understand and support the systems put in place to ensure their activities. While technology is potentially ready to construct such distributed AI eco-systems, we see three important challenges :
COOMEP is an interdisciplinary research project from FARI, an independent, not-for-profit Artificial Intelligence initiative led by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
The overall goal of this project is to co-create a socio-technical distributed coordination mechanism based on proxies that is fair towards its users and the community, while not being manipulative, enhancing rather than diminishing the agency of those concerned. To achieve this, the project will pursue the following objectives:
