Electrical and computer engineering (ECE) PhD student, Laith Alkhawaldeh, was awarded Best Student Paper at the IEEE PES ISGT-Asia 2025 conference, held in Guangzhou, China from October 31 to November 2, 2025.
His paper titled “Adaptive ADMM for Distributed Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading,” presents a distributed optimization framework for peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading among residential prosumers. The study compares centralized, dual decomposition, and ADMM-based coordination methods to enable fair and efficient local energy exchanges. The results demonstrate that the proposed distributed schemes achieve near-optimal performance while preserving user privacy and reducing computational burden.
The research addresses an increasingly important challenge in modern energy systems. As renewable energy generation and battery storage become more common in households, new approaches are required to coordinate energy trading without relying on a central operator. Distributed optimization offers a scalable and privacy-preserving solution, helping future smart grids integrate renewable energy more efficiently and sustainably.
Alkhawaldeh is a PhD student at the University of Waterloo, supervised by Dr. Claudio Cañizares and co-supervised by Dr. Kankar Bhattacharya, both professors in electrical and computer engineering. His research focuses on distributed energy management and P2P energy trading. Alkhawaldeh's ongoing work is expanding into blockchain-enabled frameworks for decentralized coordination, aiming to support the next generation of smart grid technologies.
Congratulations Laith!
Laith Alkhawaldeh, PhD student, and Dr. Claudio Canizares from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.