Abstract
The worldwide investment in renewable energy sources is leading to the formation of local energy communities in which users can trade electric energy locally. Regulations and the required enablers for effective transactions in this new context are currently being designed. Hence, the development of software tools to support local transactions is still at an early stage and faces the challenge of constant updates to the data models and business rules. The present paper proposes a novel approach for the development of software tools to solve auction-based local electricity markets, considering the special needs of local energy communities. The proposed approach considers constrained bids that can increase the effectiveness of distributed generation use. The proposed method takes advantage of semantic web technologies, in order to provide models with the required dynamism to overcome the issues related to the constant changes in data and business models. Using such techniques allows the system to be agnostic to the data model and business rules. The proposed solution includes the proposed constraints, application ontology, and semantic rule templates. The paper includes a case study based on real data that illustrates the advantages of using the proposed solution in a community with 27 consumers.