A Critical Survey of Agent-Based Wholesale Electricity Market Models

Abstract

The complexity of electricity markets calls for rich and flexible modeling techniques that help to understand market dynamics and to derive advice for the design of appropriate regulatory frameworks. Agent-Based Computational Economics (ACE) is a fairly young research paradigm that offers methods for realistic electricity market modeling. A growing number of researchers have developed agent-based models for simulating electricity markets. The diversity of approaches makes it difficult to overview the field of ACE electricity research; this literature survey should guide the way through and describe the state-of-theart of this research area. In a conclusive summary, shortcomings of existing approaches and open issues that should be addressed by ACE electricity researchers are critically discussed.

Keywords: Agent-based computational economics, Simulation, Electricity market modeling