Power TAC 2022 Call for Participation
John Collins
Are you a Bachelor, Master, or Ph.D. student 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.
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 their profits by buying and selling energy in the wholesale and retail markets, subject to fixed costs and constraints, and 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 can be one of them.
Sign up!
Please join us for the 2022 Power Trading Agent Competition. A qualifying round will be run 20-30 September 2022 (11 days), and the final round 11-26 October 2022 (16 days). Five-day trial rounds will be run in late June, July, and August 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. 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.
Questions? Please feel free to contact Wolf Ketter or John Collins.
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