7.7AIJul 9
SolarChain-Eval: A Physics-Constrained Benchmark for Trustworthy Economic Agents in Decentralized Energy MarketsShilin Ou, Yifan Xu, Luyao Zhang
As agentic AI systems are increasingly applied to cyber-physical environments, their evaluation requires assessment of both task performance and trustworthiness. In decentralized energy markets, autonomous agents may improve market utility, but may also exploit invalid physical data, create artificial liquidity, and produce unstable governance decisions. Therefore, we propose SolarChain-Eval, a physics-constrained benchmark for evaluating trustworthy economic agents. It formulates market governance as a Gymnasium-compatible Markov Decision Process, where agents make hourly decisions. SolarChain-Eval evaluates each policy across multiple dimensions, including market utility, physical safety, slippage, action smoothness, spatial fairness, and auditability. To support agentic evaluation, SolarChain-Eval incorporates an LLM-based Planner/Auditor layer. The Planner defines episode-level action bounds and audit rules, while the Auditor reviews and revises high-risk actions. All interventions are recorded through structured logs, including trigger signals, proposed actions, revised actions, and audit rationales. Experiments with static, random, myopic, RL, and RL+LLM policies reveal a clear utility-safety trade-off. RL agents improve market utility but can still produce unsafe behavior. When the physics penalty is removed, reward-maximizing agents exploit invalid generation and increase artificial liquidity. The LLM Planner/Auditor improves auditability and mitigates selected risks, but it cannot fully compensate for a misspecified reward function. These results indicate that trustworthy agentic AI evaluation requires both physical constraints and transparent intervention traces. We release data and code as open access on GitHub for replicability.
6.3CYMay 22
SolarChain: Bridging Physical Law, Verifiable Trust, and Sustainable Markets for Urban Energy ResilienceShilin Ou, Yifan Xu, Zhenshan Zhang et al.
Urban decarbonization requires scaling rooftop solar across millions of fragmented producers, yet cities face a fundamental tension: energy data is easily manipulated, and economic incentives often reward speculation rather than actual infrastructure deployment. We present SolarChain, a platform that resolves both problems by anchoring digital accountability to the thermodynamic limits of solar energy conversion. Using real-time meteorological data, geospatial coordinates, and first-principles calculations of solar yield, the system establishes a hard physical boundary for every panel's maximum possible output; any reported generation exceeding this limit is automatically rejected before entering the shared ledger. This trustless verification enables a peer-to-peer marketplace with programmatic reward structures that continuously reinvest value into equipment maintenance and market liquidity, preventing the speculative hoarding that typically destabilizes blockchain-based marketplaces. When electricity is consumed, the corresponding digital credits are permanently retired in direct proportion to physical energy dissipation, creating an auditable one-to-one mapping between urban consumption and carbon accounting. Deployed across heterogeneous city nodes, the prototype demonstrates resilience against data injection attacks while lowering capital barriers for community-level solar expansion. Beyond energy, the framework offers a general model for coordinating economic activity with physical law in any domain where distributed infrastructure demands both data integrity and sustainable investment. We release the data and code as open-access on GitHub.