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European energy policies call for an increased share of renewable energy sources and a more active role of the energy consumer. This is facilitated by, amongst others, buildings becoming energy flexible hubs, supporting smart energy grids with demand response strategies. While there is abundant technical research in this field, the related business and policy development is less well documented. This research scopes existing policy programmes and identifies opportunities and barriers to business development supporting energy flexible buildings. Using examples from seven European countries, this work reviews influencing niche management factors such as existing policy instruments, business development cases and identified stakeholder concerns, using literature research, narrative analysis and stakeholder research.National policy pathways show many differences but confirm that European buildings might become active players in the energy market, by providing energy storage, demand response and/or shifts in the use of energy sources. Slow sustained business development for energy flexibility services was mainly identified in the retail industry, and for energy service companies and aggregators. The direct involvement of end users in energy flexible buildings is still difficult. Stakeholders call for policy improvement, especially concerning the development of flexible energy tariffs, supporting incentives, awareness raising and more stakeholder-targeted business development.

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Business ecosystem is popularly used to investigate a complex social system with the business perspective, and particularly contributes to the understanding of actors and their relations in the innovation research. However, the aspect of business ecosystem modeling is limited discussed in the literature, although the importance has emerged significantly in recent years due to the emphasis on cross-disciplinary research and digitalization with artificial intelligence. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework for business ecosystem modeling with the discussion of system engineering and ecological modeling. The domain of smart grid is selected to demonstrate how system engineering, especially standards and ontologies contribute to the business ecosystem modeling. The proposed framework of the business ecosystem modeling includes three parts and nine stages that combines theories from system engineering, ecology, and business ecosystem. Part I-Business ecosystem architecture development includes four stages which aims to identify a target business ecosystem and its elements (actors, roles, and interactions). Part II-Factor analysis includes two stages to identify potential changes (and the dimensions of the changes) in the ecosystem. Part III-Ecosystem simulation and reconfiguration aims to use simulations to investigate the transition of an ecosystem and the re-configurated ecosystem. The framework not only provides a systematic approach for modeling a business ecosystem but also provides a methodological foundation for research on the aspect of complex systems in the business ecosystem field.

Multi-agent systems are well-known for their expressiveness to explore interactions and knowledge representation in complex systems. Multi-agent systems have been applied in the energy domain since the 1990s. As more applications of multi-agent systems in the energy domain for advanced functions, the interoperability raises challenge raises to an increasing requirement for data and information exchange between systems. Therefore, the application of ontology in multi-agent systems needs to be emphasized and a systematic approach for the application needs to be developed. This study aims to investigate literature on the application of ontology in multi-agent systems within the energy domain and map the key concepts underpinning these research areas. A scoping review of the existing literature on ontology for multi-agent systems in the energy domain is conducted. This paper presents an overview of the application of multi-agent systems (MAS) and ontologies in the energy domain with five aspects of the definition of agent and MAS; MAS applied in the energy domain, defined ontologies in the energy domain, MAS design methodology, and architectures, and the application of ontology in the MAS development. Furthermore, this paper provides a recommendation list for the ontology-driven multi-agent system development with the aspects of 1) ontology development process in MAS design, 2) detail design process and realization of ontology-driven MAS development, 3) open standard implementation and adoption, 4) inter-domain MAS development, and 5) agent listing approach.

Abstract:The participation of industrial consumers in smart grid transition is important due to their consumption footprint, heavy energy use and complexity in the implementation of smart energy technologies. Active involvement of industrial consumers in the development of smart grid solutions is important to ensure the energy system transformation. Despite the importance of industrial consumers has been identified, the empirical studies on the smart grid still mainly address residential and commercial consumers. Therefore, based on four case studies with two industrial consumers, one energy consulting company and one electricity retailer, this paper investigates the factors that influence industrial consumers' acceptance of smart grid solutions, and how the influential factors are relevant to the smart grid adoption phases. Eleven influential factors are identified that impact on four stages for industrial consumers' adoption of smart grid solutions (inscription, translation, framing, and stabilization stages). The eleven influential factors are: awareness of multiple contexts, shared support, return-of-investment, ease of use, flexibility and dynamic pricing, liberalization and energy tariff structure, customer focus, solution integration, process improvement, service quality, and company's green image.

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