Call for Participation: Power TAC 2022

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John Collins

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Apr 13, 2022, 9:24:01 AM4/13/22

to Power TAC support

Dear colleagues -

Are you a Bachelor, Master, or Ph.D. student, or perhaps a skilled professional, with a strong interest in autonomous agents, energy markets, or machine learning? Do you want to challenge your skills under competitive conditions with an ambitious team? Do you want to network with international energy informatics scientists? Then consider forming a Power TAC team and competing in the 2022 tournament. This year we plan to introduce into the Power TAC energy landscape model a large population of EV chargers that will offer considerable demand flexibility. This year’s tournament should give a glimpse into the potential influence of a fast-growing business - electric mobility - on retail electricity markets as businesses begin to employ revenue models that trade the aggregated value of charging services.

How do I participate?

Power TAC teams develop independent trading agents that compete against other agents in the Power Trading Agent Competition. Power TAC is a competitive simulation that models a ‘liberalized’ retail electricity market in which competing business entities or ‘brokers’ offer energy services to customers through tariff contracts. They then serve those customers by trading in a wholesale market. Brokers are challenged to maximize profits by strategically buying and selling energy in wholesale and retail markets, subject to fixed costs and constraints as well as the need to balance supply and demand. The winner of an individual ‘game’ is the broker with the highest bank balance at the end of a simulation run. Costs mimic real world considerations and include fees or penalties for publication and withdrawal of tariffs, resolving supply-demand imbalance, contributions to peak demand, and customer connections. Competing brokers are designed by teams from around the globe - your team will be a welcome addition to this growing, annual tournament.

Please join us for the 2022 Power Trading Agent Competition. A qualifying round will be run 4-20 October 2022 (16 days), and the final round from 25 October – 9 November 2022 (16 days). Five-day trial rounds will run in June, August, and September to help broker developers work out communication and interaction issues. The game specification is unchanged from the 2020-2021 competitions, so agents from previous years should operate without problems. Game data from 2020 and 2021 can be used for training. Some customer populations may be enlarged or reconfigured, and one or more additional customer types may be added, so overall demand and detailed demand profiles may differ somewhat from earlier competitions. In particular, we plan to introduce a large population of EV chargers that will offer considerable flexibility. As in previous competitions, competitors will be required to have two copies of their agents running and available to connect during the entire duration of the qualifying and final rounds.