## 2 Detailed Analysis of the Literature
### Prosumer Communities
#### 2.1.3 Prosumer Community/Coalition Formation
Opportunities for CECs include the intensified use of assets and services, expanded business opportunities, enhanced projects based on lessons learned, and improved regional infrastructure planning aligned with national planning [22]. A prosumer community that is goal-oriented is effective in attaining sustainable energy exchange [4]. Energy networks may have multiple conflicting goals like fulfilling the energy demands for external customers and the prosumer groups, increasing income, and reducing costs. Thus, a framework to manage these goals is necessary. Formation of prosumer groups based on mutual objectives may be affected by specific factors such as prosumer behavior profiles and geographical structures. A proposed framework describing the formation of PCG classifies the energy-sharing behaviors of prosumers, characterizes PCG, and detects outliers [13]. Another proposed methodology aims to assess and rank prosumers using their energy profiles to select the influential prosumers within the group [7]. The conceptual model includes four processes. First is the definition of assessment criteria namely ability to meet the energy agreement, produce more energy than agreed, trade energy with other prosumers, and the quality of historical provisioning of energy. The next process is criteria prioritization, followed by point allocation, and finally, the prosumer ranking [7]. On a technical front, the implementation of a PCG will be possible by understanding the underlying routing technologies which is especially important when forming PCG with prosumers that are geographically apart from each other. One way to address this problem is to develop intelligent geographic routing protocols [50]. It reduces communication overhead because packet forwarding decision is dependent on node positioning and the location of the end node. A wireless communication technology called geographic GReedy routing with Ant Colony Optimisation (GRACO) based recovery aggregates geographically sparse DERs into a scalable and rapidly deployable VPP. It aggregates geographic greedy forwarding strategy and ant colony optimization (ACO) method for efficient data packet delivery. Simulation results of the proposed routing protocol reveal that the delivery date conforms with the virtual power plant requirements and that the end-to-end delay reduces as paths shorten and increases network density [50]. An investigation of EPCs reveals added information about energy exchanges between prosumers [17]. A rigorous mathematical framework modeled the energy exchanges and formalized several optimization problems based on target objectives. These objectives (such as maximize distributed production, minimize losses, and optimize revenues) aim to improve a community of prosumers [17]. Following the above, we propose the following:  
**Proposition 3**. : _A goal-oriented PCG aims to maximize distributed production, optimize electricity consumption, minimize losses, and optimize revenues, thereby sustaining effective energy exchange. Prosumer behavior profiles and geographical structures affect the formation of PCGs._