Context. In forthcoming years, sustainability will lead the development of society. Implementation of innovative systems to make the world more sustainable is becoming one of the key points for science. Load balancing strategies aim to reduce economic and ecological cost of the heat production in district heating systems. Development of a decentralized solution lies in the objective of making the load balancing more accessible and attractive for the companies in charge of providing district-heating services. Objectives. This master thesis aims to find a new alternative for implementing decentralized load balancing in district heating systems. Methods. The development of this master thesis involved the review of the state-of-the-art on demand side management in district heating systems and power networks. It also implied the design of the architecture, creation of a software prototype and execution of a simulation of the system to measure the performance in terms of response time. Results. Decentralized demand side management algorithm and communication framework, software architecture description and analysis of the prototype simulation performance. Conclusions. The main conclusion is that it is possible to create a decentralized algorithm that performs load balancing without compromising the individuals’ privacy. It is possible to say that the algorithm shows good levels of performance not only from the system aggregated response time, but also from the individual performance, in terms of memory consumption and CPU consumption.