IEEMC 2011 - First International E-Energy Market Challenge

First International E-Energy Market Challenge
Today's power grid control and dispatch strategies mainly rely on centralized control centers that manage a limited number of large power plants such that their output meets the fluctuating energy demands in real time. The need for a transition to renewable energy sources leads to a quickly increasing share of small energy generators with intermittent generation timelines. In combination with smart energy consumers that change their demand patterns over time, the purely centralized approach to power grid control becomes more and more difficult to maintain. Hence, a more flexible, decentralized, and self-organizing control infrastructure must be developed that can be actively managed to balance both the large grid as a whole, as well as the many lower voltage sub-grids with its many small energy generators (e.g. photovoltaic installations or combined-heat-and-power combustion engines). Depending on the granularity and the time frame of the traded power products, there will be a strong need for agents acting autonomously on behalf of their stakeholders. The clever use of concepts from autonomic and organic computing as well as from multi-agent systems and from economics will be essential for succeeding in the competition.

One candidate for such a new control infrastructure is an energy market at the retail level, i.e. at the level of currently completely passive and unmanaged (low-voltage) distribution grids. To help mitigate the risk of instituting such markets in the real world, agent-based simulations of such markets can provide important insights. Workshop participants are thus invited to join in to a program of economic modeling and laboratory experimentation to understand and experiment with retail energy market design along with the performance of their own autonomous agents in a competitive simulation environment.

We ask for submission of agent-based models and corresponding papers describing the design of trading agents for retail energy markets.

We, moreover, want to present a competitive testbed environment for agent-based simulations along the lines of the well-established trading agent competitions. This trading agent competition for energy markets (Power TAC) is supposed to facilitate research and development of appropriate retail energy market structures along with corresponding software agents that can support or even automate decision making in these markets. This environment will model a market-based management structure for local and regional energy networks at multiple levels of complexity. It will closely model reality by using real historic data on energy production and consumption, weather, and consumer preferences. A more detailed description of the competition is available online at powertac.org. We hope to run a live competition at the workshop.

Important Dates:

Paper submission deadline: March 31, 2011
Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2011
Camera ready paper: May 15, 2011
Workshop date: June 18, 2011
Submissions and further information

Agent validation and testing is a cornerstone of agent-based simulations and therefore the key deliverable for workshop contributions is a functional energy agent implementation to be demonstrated at the workshop. Companion papers should be around 10 pages including the text, figures and references.

The submissions must be formatted according to the ACM proceedings format. Papers can be submitted via the EasyChair submission system:

www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=ieemc11
For any further questions, send your email to: ieemc-AT-iism.uni-karlsruhe.de

Organisation
Organizing committee

Christof Weinhardt, KIT
Wolfgang Ketter, RSM
Lilia Filipova-Neumann, FZI
Anke Weidlich, SAP Research
Program committee

Carsten Block, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
John Collins, University of Minnesota
Hellmuth Frey, EnBW
Christoph Flath, FZI
Steven Kimbrough, Wharton School of Business
Steffen Lamparter, Siemens
Detlev Schumann, IBM
Orestis Terzidis, SAP Research
Clemens van Dinther, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Harald Vogt, SAP Research