This paper provides a survey of the literature on the application of Multi-agent Systems (MAS) technology for Smartgrids. Smartgrids represent the next generation electric network, as communities are developing self-sufficient and environmentally friendly energy production. As a cyber-physical system, the development of the vision of Smartgrids requires the resolution of major technical problems; this has fed over a decade of research. Due to the stochastic, intermittent nature of renewable energy resources and the heterogeneity of the agents involved in a Smartgrid, demand and supply management, energy trade and control of grid elements constitute great challenges for stable operation. In addition, in order to offer resilience against faults and attacks, Smartgrids should also have restoration, self-recovery and security capabilities. Multi-agent systems (MAS) technology has been a popular approach to deal with these challenges in Smartgrids, due to their ability to support reasoning in a distributed context. This survey reviews the literature concerning the use of MAS models in each of the relevant research areas related to Smartgrids. The survey explores how researchers have utilized agent-based tools and methods to solve the main problems of Smartgrids. The survey also discusses the challenges in the advancement of Smartgrid technology and identifies the open problems for research from the view of multi-agent systems.

Earlier epistemic planning systems for multi-agent domains generate plans that contain various types of actions such as ontic, sensing, or announcement actions. However, none of these systems consider untruthful announcements, i.e., none can generate plans that contain a lying or a misleading announcement. In this paper, we present a novel epistemic planner, called EFP3.0, for multi-agent domains with untruthful announcements. The planner is similar to the systems EFP or EFP2.0 in that it is a forward-search planner and can deal with unlimited nested beliefs and common knowledge by employing a Kripke based state representation and implementing an update model based transition function. Different from EFP, EFP3.0 employs a specification language that uses edge-conditioned update models for reasoning about effects of actions in multi-agent domains. We describe the basics of EFP3.0 and conduct experimental evaluations of the system against state-of-the-art epistemic planners. We discuss potential improvements that could be useful for scalability and efficiency of the system.

This paper proposes a method based on high-level action description languages for reasoning about hypothetical action occurrences in a multi-agent environments. In order to accommodate this type of reasoning, one needs to consider non-deterministic observability of action occurrences of agents. The paper presents an extension of the language mA^*, called mA^*_e, to allow for non-deterministic observability and hypothetical actions. The paper defines the semantics of the new language using edge-conditioned update models and discusses properties of the new language, including differences from approaches that use Dynamic Epistemic Logic. The new definitions are illustrated using the well-known story of two stockbrokers from the literature.