Context

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.

Challenge

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 :

• 1. How to govern energy in a moment of crisis (or many crises at the same time) that affects their energy needs?
• 2. How do we regulate the resource in a way that is not only efficient but also democratic?
• 3. How to involve both expertise and other major stakeholders (e.g., the citizens of Brussels) in the design process to avoid a techno-solutionist answer to this problem?

Partners

• IRIDIA – ULB
• MLG – ULB
• AI Lab – VUB
• SMIT – VUB
• LSTS – VUB

About the project

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)