Enabling Moral Agency in Distributed Energy Management: An Ethics Score for Negotiations in Multi-Agent Systems

Intelligent and autonomous agents have gained increased recognition as a solution for the efficient and reliable operation of distributed and digitalised power systems. In multi-agent systems, agents use negotiation to coordinate their behaviour, letting them exchange information and make informed control decisions according to a shared goal. However, as power systems are socio-technical systems, too, the agents' autonomous decisions directly or indirectly impact the welfare of human beings. Thus, the question of moral agency arises: How can the agents' decision-making, and the resulting behaviour of the overall system, be aligned with moral values and ethical principles? Unfortunately, this important question is often overlooked in the current state of the art. In this paper, we therefore introduce an ethics score to be used within agent-based power systems in order to enable explicit moral agency in distributed power management. As a showcase, we extend the multi-agent system WINZENT in such a way that all agents are able to include the ethics score as a notion of goodness and fairness in their decision-making without impacting the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the agent-based control. We demonstrate the feasibility of the concept in a case study of a future urban distribution grid modelled after the city of Bremerhaven, Germany, and discuss strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach.