Renewable energy sources are one key enabler to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and to cope with the anthropogenic climate change. Their intermittent behavior and limited storage capabilities present a new challenge to power system operators to maintain power quality and reliability. Additional technical complexity arises from the large number of small distributed generation units and their allocation within the power system. Market liberalization and changing regulatory framework lead to additional organizational complexity. As a result, the design and operation of the future electric energy system have to be redefined. Sophisticated information and communication architectures, automation concepts, and control approaches are necessary in order to manage the higher complexity of so-called smart grids. This paper provides an overview of the state of the art and recent developments enabling higher intelligence in future smart grids. The integration of renewable sources and storage systems into the power grids is analyzed. Energy management and demand response methods and important automation paradigms and domain standards are also reviewed.

Future industrial systems can be realized using the cyber-physical systems (CPSs) that advocate the coexistence of cyber and physical counterparts in a network structure to perform the system's functions in a collaborative manner. Multiagent systems share common ground with CPSs and can empower them with a multitude of capabilities in their efforts to achieve complexity management, decentralization, intelligence, modularity, flexibility, robustness, adaptation, and responsiveness. This work surveys and analyzes the current state of the industrial application of agent technology in CPSs, and provides a vision on the way agents can effectively enable emerging CPS challenges.