Shuai Mao

Zixiang Wang, Mengjia Gong, Qiyu Sun et al.

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems (MASs) are evolving from classical paradigms toward architectures built upon large foundation models (LFMs). This survey provides a systematic review and comparative analysis of classical MASs (CMASs) and LFM-based MASs (LMASs). First, within a closed-loop coordination framework, CMASs are reviewed across four fundamental dimensions: perception, communication, decision-making, and control. Beyond this framework, LMASs integrate LFMs to lift collaboration from low-level state exchanges to semantic-level reasoning, enabling more flexible coordination and improved adaptability across diverse scenarios. Then, a comparative analysis is conducted to contrast CMASs and LMASs across architecture, operating mechanism, adaptability, and application. Finally, future perspectives on MASs are presented, summarizing open challenges and potential research opportunities.

Luolin Xiong, Yang Tang, Chensheng Liu et al.

Energy storage systems (ESS) are pivotal component in the energy market, serving as both energy suppliers and consumers. ESS operators can reap benefits from energy arbitrage by optimizing operations of storage equipment. To further enhance ESS flexibility within the energy market and improve renewable energy utilization, a heterogeneous photovoltaic-ESS (PV-ESS) is proposed, which leverages the unique characteristics of battery energy storage (BES) and hydrogen energy storage (HES). For scheduling tasks of the heterogeneous PV-ESS, cost description plays a crucial role in guiding operator's strategies to maximize benefits. We develop a comprehensive cost function that takes into account degradation, capital, and operation/maintenance costs to reflect real-world scenarios. Moreover, while numerous methods excel in optimizing ESS energy arbitrage, they often rely on black-box models with opaque decision-making processes, limiting practical applicability. To overcome this limitation and enable transparent scheduling strategies, a prototype-based policy network with inherent interpretability is introduced. This network employs human-designed prototypes to guide decision-making by comparing similarities between prototypical situations and encountered situations, which allows for naturally explained scheduling strategies. Comparative results across four distinct cases underscore the effectiveness and practicality of our proposed pre-hoc interpretable optimization method when contrasted with black-box models.