CrocodileAgent Team Activities: Solutions for Trading and Visualization in Future Energy Markets

Publications

Jurica Babic, Ivo Buljevic, Sinisa Matetic, Tomislav Brisevac, Vedran Podobnik

University of Zagreb, Croatia

Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing

University of Zagreb, Croatia

The Trading Agent Competition (TAC) is an international forum which promotes high quality research

regarding the trading agent problem

Trading Agent Competition

Abstract

Power Trading Agent Competition

...

Energy layer

ICT layer

Market layer

Transmission

Production Distribution

Consumption

Demand-side management

Real-time monitoring

Smart metering

Grid balancing

BiddingTariff offerings

Retail Wholesale

Grid management

Market applications

money flow

data flow

energy flow

e-

e-

e-

e-

1000101...

Power Trading Agent Competition (Power TAC) is

an open, competitive market simulation platform

aiming to provide an insight into the structure and

operation of retail energy markets. Research results

obtained from Power TAC will be used to derive

market rules for future retail-level energy markets.

In this simulation competitors are brokers that

provide energy services to retail customers using

tariff offerings, while managing their energy loads

by trading in a wholesale market.

CrocodileAgent Activities on the Retail Market

Power TAC Official Website: http://www.powertac.org/J. Babic and V. Podobnik, An analysis of Power TAC trial, in Proceedings of the 2013 AAAI Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis, 2013

S. Matetic, Intelligent trading agent for power trading through tariff market , Master Thesis, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, 2013I. Buljevic, Intelligent trading agent for power trading through wholesale market, Master Thesis, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, 2013T. Brisevac, Visualization module for a simulation platform for power trading, Master Thesis, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, 2013J. Babic et al., The CrocodileAgent 2012: Research for Efficient Agent-based Electricity Trading Mechanisms, in Special Session on Trading Agent Competition @ KES-AMSTA 2012, 2012, pp. 1-13S. Matetic et al., The CrocodileAgent 2012: Negotiating Agreements in a Smart Grid Tariff Market, in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Agreement Technologies (AT 2012), 2012, pp. 203-204I. Buljevic, et al., The CrocodileAgent 2012: Reaching Agreements in a Simulation of a Smart Grid Wholesale Market , Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Agreement Technologies (AT 2012), 2012, pp. 111-112

Motivation Key features Achievements

Our Website: http://agents.tel.fer.hr/power_tac

timeslot n-1 timeslot n

Initiate strategy evaluator and superseding

activities

CrocodileAgent successfully acquired a high market share in the ongoing trials (March, April and May 2013).

Modular tariff design with the involved learning process.

CrocodileAgent is reactive to external and internal events and stimuli:

- lost subscribers are recovered with success; and- new subscribers are attracted also.

Using energy usage data as an input for creating smart tariffs

CrocodileAgent Activities on the Wholesale Market

Key features Achievements

LEARNING MODULE

BIDDING STRATEGIES

MARKET MANAGER

BIDDING EFFICIENCYINFORMATION

GENERATED BIDDING

S1 S2 S4S3 S5 NEEDEDAMOUNT

REWARDMODULE

WEIGHTEDRANDOMIZER

Design of the adaptive learning

module to be used on wholesale

market.

Adaptation of Roth-Erev

algorithm for the Power TAC

wholesale market.

Minimization of balancing costs

through smart strategies

implementation.

Positive impact on broker s total

revenue achieved through

wholesale market.

Implementation of a learning module to support wholesale

bidding process.

Multiple strategies which allow broker to adapt to various

situations on the wholesale market.

Advanced strategy evaluation based on efficiency on the

wholesale market.

Advanced reward function adapted for a day-ahead market.

Motivation

Pri

ce (€

)Im

bal

ance

(kW

h)

Timeslot

CrocodileAgent s energy imbalance drops as time progresses

CrocodileAgent team is a Croatian-based team of students who focus their research on trading agents. The team is especially interested in the domain of the smart grid with an emphasis on its market aspect. Therefore, the team is one the most active teams in the Power TAC project, a project which aims to develop a simulator for future energy markets.

The team prepared an agent, called CrocodileAgent, to participate in the Power TAC final tournament (July 2013). The agent itself contains intelligent mechanisms for trading in retail and wholesale markets.

As an active contributor of Power TAC platform, the team has also developed the Power TAC Visualizer, a web application which allows an advanced analysis of the market behaviour within the Power TAC game by identifying and visualizing smart grid key performance indicators (KPIs).

The key focus is on the creation of suitable power subscription tariffs for various types of customers – thereby offering additional services and payment options.

Simulated retail markets provide useful information for real world market evolution.

An agent must combine a broad range of parameters and automate the tariff creation process, learn while doing it, and adapt to current market trends.

One of the biggest problems in

wholesale trading is to keep

energy demand and supply in

balance.

In case of energy imbalance,

broker needs to pay balancing

transactions, which can have a

big impact on broker s revenue.

Hence, there is a strong need

to develop wholesale bidding

strategy which will minimize

negative effects on the balancing

market.

Wholesale market is an important mechanism for broker portfolio balancing

CrocodileAgent s busy retail schedule in every timeslot

Architecture of a learning module for the wholesale bidding process

Power TAC relates to a market layer of the smart grid

Power TAC Visualizer

Motivation Key featuresDeveloped as a web

application, Power TAC Visualizer: enables real-time

observing of Power TAC game; and

provides enhanced analysis of game in progress by presenting brokers' achievements in different game parts.

Visualizer is a standard part of the Power TAC release package.

Web application with a push mechanism.

Attractive design with the help of state-of-the-art web technologies.

Various graph types for exhaustive analysis, such as:

- spider chart- 3-level pie chart- multiple panes line charts.

Experiment setup capabilities.

See example visualizationswith our agenton the right. Game overview

Distribution

Balancing Wholesale

Tariff

Total

Customer portfolio

default broker

LARGEpower AstonTAC

INAOEBroker01

CrocodileAgent

Wholesale market

2 Nov 9 Nov 23 Nov 30 Nov-50k

0k

50k

-2M

-1M

0M

Trad

ed e

ner

gy (

MW

h)

Pri

ce (

€)

Timeslot

Summer School on Matching Problems,

Markets, and Mechanisms

Budapest, Hungary24-28 June 2013

The authors acknowledge the support of research project Intelligent Software Agents for Managing Processes on Electronic Markets , supported by the Foundation of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, as well as research project Content Delivery and Mobility of Users and Services in New Generation Networks , funded by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia.