A-CPES: A Reference Framework for Agentic AI in Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

Applying the concept of controlled self-organization in agent-based Cyber-Physical Energy Systems (CPES) is a promising approach to ensure system robustness. By introducing an observer/controller architecture to the system, this concept allows for self-organization while still enabling intervention when disturbances occur. Thus, it is possible to respond to effects of cyber attacks, a major threat to current energy systems. However, when implementing an observer to monitor the system and a controller to execute actions for controlled self-organization in CPES, it is essential to take into account restrictions on information and actions resulting from the privacy of local distributed energy resources, regulatory constraints, and data exchange requirements. For this reason, this paper presents architecture variants for the observer and controller that take into account restrictions on access to information and limited actions. In addition, it evaluates possible controller actions in various architectures. The results underscore the importance of considering observer/controller architectures when designing agent-based systems to ensure their robustness for real-world applications.

Enterprises are deploying autonomous AI agents faster than they can govern them, and prevailing approaches stretch a single discipline, typically DevSecOps built for deterministic automation, across every scale of agency. We argue that agentic AI governance is four problems, not one, each with a mature governing science. The CASE framework assigns Control theory to the individual agent (intent as setpoint, guardrails as feedback, evaluation as observation), complex Adaptive systems theory to agent collectives (where emergence makes single-agent assurance non-compositional), Supervisory cybernetics to human-agent teams (where the Law of Requisite Variety shows unaided human oversight fails structurally), and Engineering operations to fleets (extending error budgets to decision quality so autonomy becomes a controlled variable). We formalize each layer, derive cross-layer coupling conditions, including a zero-touch deployment paradox where excellence at one-layer strains the others, and trace twenty-plus enterprise controls to their classical constructs. Three empirical studies validate the thesis: 82 percent of documented production agent failures are multi-layer trajectories; none of 22 ecosystem tools offers full Layer 2 (emergence) coverage; and all 35 scored public deployments fall in the lowest maturity band. We name this mismatch, risk realized at the emergence layer against capability barely offered and practice absent, the Emergence Gap. A five-level maturity model with a non-compensatory bottleneck-weighted index and assessment instrument operationalizes CASE as a scientific rather than process maturity model, grounded in production enterprise agentic platforms. As EU AI Act Article 14 makes effective human oversight a legal requirement, only architectures satisfying requisite variety can make oversight real rather than ceremonial.

Current AI energy benchmarks measure consumption per model invocation. For agentic systems, where a single user goal may trigger multistep orchestration, tool calls, retries, and failure recovery, the invocation count is an implementation artifact rather than a task property, and per inference normalization misrepresents the energy cost of completing a goal. We present A-LEMS (Agentic LLM Energy Measurement System), a cross layer framework that redefines the unit of AI energy accounting as Energy per Successful Goal (EpG): total workflow energy across all attempts, including failures and retries, divided by successfully completed goals. A-LEMS combines a temporal boundary model, a five layer attribution pipeline mapping hardware signals (RAPL on x86; SPBM and DCGM on ARM) to workflow energy, and a reproducibility protocol binding every measurement to hardware, environment, and runtime configuration. Building on EpG, we define the Orchestration Overhead Index (OOI), the ratio of agentic to linear EpG on matched goals under identical success criteria. Across nine task families on Intel x86 and NVIDIA Grace GB10 ARM, CPU only OOI ranges 0.35x to 11.07x. Including GPU dynamic energy, which accounts for 83.8% of agentic EpG in local inference, widens this to 0.4x to 26.48x, so CPU only measurement understates overhead about twofold for reasoning tasks. For remote inference, network wait energy shifts OOI from 2.5x to 2.35x. The overhead arises from orchestration structure (planning, retries, recovery) that induces additional inference calls, not from costlier individual calls. The metric is not biased upward: single tool calculator dispatch inverts to OOI = 0.61x (95% CI [0.35, 0.97]) on x86. Goal level accounting via EpG and OOI provides a measurement foundation for benchmarking agentic AI.