All you need to do for your company to be able to leverage the PowerMatcher technology is to make your appliance capable of talking PowerMatcher language. It needs a device driver for EF-Pi and a device agent for PowerMatcher.

The device driver entails the physical connection and mapping of the device control space to the EF-Pi control space. A device driver is manufacturer, type and model specific. The benefit of developing a device driver is that in the future any Energy App like the PowerMatcher that interfaces with the EF-Pi platform can control your appliance.

The device agent contains logic to use the EF-Pi control space and construct bids for the PowerMatcher market. EF-Pi defines four abstraction categories (See EF-Pi): Uncontrolled, Time Shifter, Buffer/Storage, Unconstrained, therefore at least four types of agents are necessary. For each of these categories simple agents are already available open source and can be customized to your liking. You could add additional business rules or make the agent even smarter by including optimization techniques.

Check out our list of ready available drivers and agents or follow this tutorial that instructs your developers to build a driver or agent quickly and easily.