Consensus Reaching With Heterogeneous User Preferences

In this paper, we consider consumers and prosumers who interact on a platform. Consumers buy energy to the platform to maximize their usage benefit while minimizing the cost paid to the platform. Prosumers, who have the possibility to generate energy, self-consume part of it to maximize their usage benefit and sell the rest to the platform to maximize their revenue. Product differentiation is introduced and consumers can specify preferences regarding locality, RES-based generation , and matchings with the prosumers. The consumers and prosumers' problems being coupled through a matching probability, we provide analytical characterizations of the resulting Nash equilibrium. Assuming supply-shortages occur, we reformulate the platform problem as a consensus problem that we solve using Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), enabling minimal information exchanges between the nodes. On top of the platform, a trust-based mechanism combining exploitation of nodes with good reputation and exploration of new nodes, is implemented to determine the miner node which validates the transactions. A case study is provided to analyze the impact of preferences and miner selection dynamic process.