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The existing energy management systems often prioritize system efficiency (balanced energy demand and supply) at the expense of consumer comfort. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a novel decentralized multi-agent coordination-based demand-side management system. The proposed system enables individual agents to coordinate for demand-side energy optimization while improving the consumer comfort and maintaining the system efficiency. A key innovation of this work is the introduction of a slot exchange mechanism, where agents first receive optimized appliance-level energy consumption schedules and then coordinate with each other to adjust these schedules through slot exchanges to improve their comfort even when agents show non-altruistic behaviour. It also scales well with large populations and promotes fairness by balancing satisfaction levels across consumers. For performance evaluation, a real-world dataset is used, and the results demonstrate that the proposed slot exchange mechanism increases consumer comfort and fairness without raising system inefficiency cost, making it a practical and scalable solution for future smart grids.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1140\/epjds\/s13688-026-00635-4","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,19]],"date-time":"2026-03-19T08:48:17Z","timestamp":1773910097000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Cooperative flexibility exchange: fair and comfort-aware decentralized resource allocation"],"prefix":"10.1140","volume":"15","author":[{"given":"Rabiya","family":"Khalid","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Evangelos","family":"Pournaras","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,19]]},"reference":[{"key":"635_CR1","unstructured":"International Energy Agency (2025) Renewables 2025 Renewable Electricity. 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