Digital Finance - Call for Papers: Smart Contract Based Electricity Markets
Special Issue "Smart Contract Based Electricity Markets"
Overview
Digitalisation is one of the major megatrends of the 21st century, which is increasingly radiating into more and more areas of life, creating new business models. The energy sector, is seeing rapid development of uses of digitalisation. In the electricity market, digitalisation enables high transaction speeds and micro-transactions; parts of the electricity market could be organised decentrally and automatically between producers and consumers, including energy storage and demand response, and certification and trading of green electricity can be simplified and made more transparent. Recently, P2P trading defined as “a contractual model that will enable short-term electricity exchange on a regional or national scale between multiple peers such as ‘prosumers’ or/and small to medium power generators or/and electricity appliances located at the end of distribution networks, i.e. distributed energy resources”. The P2P trading will normally be based on contractual rules and electricity prices determined by the market or the contract, as well as predetermined conditions governing the automated execution and settlement of the transaction. Especially the last element, the automated execution and settlement, will require extensive use of digitalisation. In most pilot or full business schemes existing to date, blockchain is used for this automated execution and settlement. Indeed, blockchain technology provide a decentralised market to local energy consumer and prosumers and probably reduce transaction costs. It implements a market mechanism in the form of a smart contract without the need for a central authority coordinating the market. Recently blockchain use auction designs to match future demand and supply. Thus, it relies on accurate short-term forecasts of individual households’ energy consumption and production. Hence, an accurate electricity market forecasts is needed. However, electricity is a very special commodity. It is economically non-storable. At the same time, electricity demand depends on weather (temperature, wind speed, precipitation, etc.) and the intensity of business and everyday activities (on-peak vs. off-peak hours, weekdays vs. weekends, holidays and near-holidays, etc.). On the one hand, these unique and specific characteristics lead to price dynamics not observed in any other market, exhibiting seasonality at the daily, weekly and annual levels, and abrupt, short-lived and generally unanticipated price spikes. On the other hand, they have encouraged researchers to intensify their efforts in the development of better forecasting techniques. Recently, machine learning methods yield a better predictive accuracy (compared to statistical methods). Indeed, computational intelligence techniques combine elements of learning, evolution and fuzziness to create approaches that are capable of adapting to complex dynamic systems.
This special issue aims at bringing together contributions that have proposed new theoretical or applied insights on Electricity Forecasting with a focus on Machine Learning, blockchain and P2P trading.
We encourage submission of papers related to Electricity market dealing with the following subject fields (but not limited to): Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain Technology, smart contracts and P2P electricity trading.
Editors of the Special Issue
Souhir Ben Amor, Humboldt University of Berlin
Brenda Lopez Cabrera, Humboldt University of Berlin,
Florian Ziel, University Duisburg-Essen,
Rafał Weron, Wrocław University of Science and Technology,
Rüdiger Kiesel, University Duisburg-Essen
Instructions for Submission
For submission, the full paper, a blind copy and a separate title page should be sent to the special issue editorial board via email at the following (clickable) address: All submissions should be in PDF.
Potential authors are reminded that all papers that are finally accepted for this special issue will be subject to format restrictions complying with the publisher standards. To speed up publication, and to ensure a unified layout throughout the special issue, authors are kindly advised to use LaTeX. The Springer's LaTeX template (click here) (this opens in a new tab) (this opens in a new tab) can be used to prepare source files (please choose the formatting option "smallextended").
The authors are highly recommended not to modify the class file by introducing personal settings and/or definitions.
Important Dates
− Call for papers: April 2021
− Deadline for paper submission: 31 October 2021
− First-round decisions by: 30 November 2021
− Deadline for second-round submission: 31 October 2021
− Final decisions on acceptance by: 30 November 2021
About Digital Finance
The journal is a top tier peer-reviewed academic and practitioner journal that publishes high-quality articles with a focus on digital finance and innovation as well as on the analysis of digital and internet innovations on financial services and the economy. The journal publishes theoretical or empirical, qualitative or quantitative papers of interest to academics, practitioners, and regulators with the emphasis on empirical, financial market, and investment innovation, financial policy research and recommendations related to improving the welfare in the digital economy. Further details on this journal are available on the Springer website: https://www.springer.com/journal/42521 (this opens in a new tab)