The strategy and architecture of a winner broker in a renowned agent-based smart grid competition

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Ozdemir, Serkan^{; *} | Unland, Rainer

Affiliations: DAWIS, University of Duisburg-Essen, Schützenbahn 70, 45127 Essen, Germany

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: Serkan.Oezdemir@icb.uni-due.de.

Abstract: Local energy production and distributed energy storage facilities will take a prominent position in the future smart grid along with the challenge of sustainability. To cope with that, smart grid simulation platforms are needed in order to analyze the problems of two-way data and energy flow. The Power Trading Agent Competition (Power TAC) provides an open source, smart grid simulation platform to enable various smart grid studies from the perspective of sustainability. In this paper, we present AgentUDE, which competed in the Power TAC 2014 and 2015 Final games as a broker agent. Here, we create and formalize information system artefacts for the electricity trading problem in a continuous and competitive environment. The main trading problem is partitioned to smaller problems to reduce the complexity. Therefore, wholesale and retail electricity market activities are individually discussed for AgentUDE14. In 2015 competition, we added a capacity control capability to AgentUDE14, which was introduced as AgentUDE15. We show that AgentUDE is a successful broker agent in many metrics, analyzing its performance in controlled experiments and international tournaments. We have also reviewed the tournament data from the winner agent’s point of view.

Keywords: Smart grid, trading agent, electricity markets, power trading, brokers

DOI: 10.3233/WEB-170358

Journal: Web Intelligence, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 165-183, 2017