Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Shanghai, 26-29 August 2004

AGENT-BASED RETAIL ELECTRICITY MARKET:

MODELING AND ANALYSIS
JING YU', JIAN-ZHONG ZHOU', JUNJIE YANG', WEI wu', BO FU', RONG-TAO LIAO*
!
'Department of Hydropower and Information Engineering, Huazbong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan,
Hubei 430074, P.R.Chma
'Department of Computer Science and Technology, Huazbong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei
430074, P.R.China
E-MAIL yujing77 12@ 163.com, jz.zhou @mail.hust,edu.cn

Abstract: These challenge the researchers who are interested in this

In the past decades, power systems in the whole world
have been facing pressure to he deregulated or restructured.
Tbis researeh has designed an agent-based retail electricity
market to simulate the trading procedure in modem power
systems, and utilize Colored Petri nets technology to present
the communications and cooperatino nf agents in the market.
We design fnnr kinds of participant agents: Power Exchanger
Agent(PXA), Power User Agents(PUAs), Retail Company
Agents(RCAs) and Independent Power Plant Agents (IPPAs).
PXA is supervisor of the marketplace, in charge of opening
and dosing the market, and dealing with the trading request
from the other agents, avoiding conflicts with constraints of
power transmission grids. The other three kinds of agents
could enter the marketplace arbitrary if it opens and freely
select their satisfied consumerdproviders, which are the chief
distinctionsof our design. The results of analysis show that the
proposed retail electricity market could increase efficiency,
reduce operational costs and give consumers more alternatives.
Though it has more latently conflicts and concurrencies, which
cause a tittle complication, we successfully deal with them by
colored Petri nets.
Keywords:
Intelligent agent; colored Petri ne@ retail electricity
market; hybrid method; communicationand cooperation
1.' Introduction
Deregulation and restructuring of power systems has
area a lot.
Although some progess in modeling electricity
market are achieved, relatively little has been done at the
retail level. Customers with freedom to choose between
products and suppliers (and conversely) chakicterize the
retail electricity market"'. To obtain a satisfied result of
scheduling the consumption (generation) in day-ahead retail
electricity market, the power consumers (producers) must
not only have good forecast ability but also good
psychology. So how to develop an efficient trading system,
how to guarantee the impartiality of trading procedure, and
how to solve the conflicts lurking'in communications and
cooperation among traders are'important problems we are
facing.
Agent technology, as. a useful tool in distributed
artificial intelligence, attracts us greatly. Some agent-based
simulators have been constructed for electricity
markets'"~'*]. These models have hinted at the potential of
agent-based models for the analysis of electricity markets.'
However, they either consider electricity market as auction
marketplace, bidding round after round, or view it as
electronic commerce; considering electricity power as
normal commodity. That. does not fully represent the
characters of retail electricity market. In retail electricity
market, information flows and business procedure bill now
take place arbitrarily .between totally separate participants.
Obviously, the trading procedure contains lots of
'

been an important area for the past decades, because it will
promote competition among alternative retail electricity
providers, cause providers to be more cost-efficient,
eliminate high-cost providers, and result in lower retail
electricity pnces for customers'". Thus centralized system
planning and operation management must be remodeled to
adapt to the new market environment. In recent years, many
countries around the world have modified their electricity
supply frame, and constructed types of electricity market.
concurrencies and it is'hard to avoid conflicts among
consumers (producers or suppliers). Therefore, we will
apply colored Petri nets, which have a semantics that builds
upon true concurrency and conflict'instead of interleaving'".
to describe the information flows and business procedure
among trading>agents.By the constructed colored Petri net,
we could w i l y detect the conflicts, and avoid them in
model .the interactions of agents.
However, it would be impossible for paper of any !

~7803-8403-2/04/$20.00@2W4 IEEE
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 Proceedings of the Tbird International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Shanghai, 26-29 August 2004
reasonable length to cover all the aspects of retail electricity
market. As a result, this paper focus on constructing an
agent-based retail electricity market model to simulate the
trading procedure and the behaviors of participants, which
will be described in section 2, then presents the information
flows and business procedure among trading agents via
colored Petri nets in section 3. And the agent-based model
fusion with colored Petri net could solve the talent conflicts
and concurrencies lurking in the communications and
cooperation among agents successfully. With little
modifications, the model can be extended and implemented
to the rest aspects as well.
2. Agent-based retail electricity market
We assume that the reader has basic knowledge of
intelligent agent and colored Petri nets, so that we will not
describe the concepts of them in detail. In this section, we
firstly draw a sketch of our designed agent-based retail
electricity market, and then describe the object, knowledge
and planner in each agent, with pseudocode elaboration of
the infernal behaviors separately. At the end of this section
interactions among agents are mentioned.
2.1.Architecture of the agent-based retail electricity
market
A simplified classification of the participants in retail
electricity market follows ["I:
a. Independent Power Plant (IPP)
b. Power Exchange Companies (PX)
c. Retail Companies (RC)
d. Power Users (PU)
According to these participants, we constructed four
types of agents: independent power plant agent (IPPA),
power exchange agent (PXA), retail company agent (RCA)
and power user agent (PUA). The agents work together to
form the retail electricity markets with other agents.
Hereafter we will refer to PPAs, RCAs and PUAs as
trading agents. Figure. 1 shows the architecture sketch.
Trading agents could change their role as buyer or
seller as their electric power requirements change. In our
agent-based prototype of retail electricity market, each
trading agent can be viewed as either inviting public
bidding for purchase-plan containing that quantity Qh of
electricity at an asking price APh for consume at each hour
h next day (assume that each time part in schedule is one
hour), or compete to sell their 24-hours power service-plan.
In this paper, we view IPPAs as buyers and PUAs as sellers,
and that RCAs have dual nature (sell power to PUAs or buy
power from IPPAs), and PXA p!ays the role of maintaining
the power system works safely and stably. That is to say,
96
when IPPAs or RCAs service their customers, they should
enquire PXA whether there is any conflict with power grid
constraints, such as power transmission capability, balance
between supply and requirement, and so on.
Because the day-ahead retail electricity market is open
and closed at a certain clock (e.g. close at 12 noon the day
before they desire delivery), the trading agents must
accomplish their trade in a limited time. Each trading agent
has a unique buying and selling strategy. They can exhibit
anxious buying and selling behavior, rational behavior or
greedy behavior. See Figure 2 for an illustration of different
buying and selling strategies.
',.-
Figure I . Architeerure sketch of Figure 2. Agent buying and selling
retail electricity market strategies"
So different agents would learn and react in different
way. As the time goes on, the trading agents who does not
accomplish trade will change their bid prices, or modify
consumption curve, even give up some benefit (these
decisions are made by planner mechanism of trading agent).
After PXA open the marketplace, the trading agent
could join it on arbitrarily time spot before it closed. The
intemal behaviors of agents could be implemented by
pseudocode in section 2.2.
2.2. Elaboration of participant agents
The agents in our retail electricity market are
intelligent agents, which has its objective (cost or profit
objective). They could update their knowledge '
autonomously according to their temporal (or final) trading
result, which lead them make mok satisfied trade-plan to
succeed in their object. That is to say, an agent could learn
(update knowledge base), and plan its activities to reaction
the events outside, and achieve its object. So we consider
the each agent is composed of three main mechanisms:
object, knowledge base (KB) and planner.
2.2.1 PXA
Object of PXA is that economize the power grid to
 Proceedings of the Third International Conference 00 Machine Learning and Cybemetics, Shanghai, 26-29 August 2004

deliver required quantity of electric power from trading 233 RCA

agents on condition that all the constraints are satisfied.
PXA hold a sectional tariff for the transit of electric power, Object of RCA is maximizing its profit:
which is broadcasted to every trading agent in the market PmfitofRCA= PayFmmPUA-PayTolPPA-Pay ToPX
but could only be modified by PXA itself. KB of PXA where PaytoIPPA= Knowledge base contains of tariff for
contains the data related to grid utilization status (e.g. the transit of electric power, purchase (provide) price data
resewed power delivery capability). Planner dedicate to of PUAs (IPPs). Planner dedicates to match the best pair
how to efficiently utilize every delivery line in the grid cooperators of PUA and IPPA.
according to the requested delivery quantity and avoid any
conflicts with constraints. There are lots of optimization Pseudocode of RCA:
algorithms could be applied to design the planner, .we 1. Enter the marketploee and cakulore the rest Iim it could spend on
trade (7imeForRCATmdej.
would not describe it in detail for paper length limits. 2. Addthe delivery tadffto RCA-KB
While 7imeForRCATrade >O ,do (
Pseudocode of PXA: 3. Receive donondsfrwn PUAs .
1. Open marktploce and invite trading agents. 4 Evolute andmake the mstpmfitabk PUanpPa table.
Wile 7irneofTadoO. do( 5. Smdpurchnseplan tolPPAs in mblc.
If any trading agent ewer the m r k p l o c e ( If IPPA reply occepfame (
2. Broadcast tarifl for the transit of electricpower: 1 6. Sendpmvide plon to eomsponding PUA in fable
If PUA reply a order (
If enquiry come ( 7. Enquire PXA
3. Receive; If PXA permits (
4. If enquiry not conflict constraints { 8.. Sign contract with PUA and comsponding IPP
5. Add request to PX-KBto be scheduled) ] Else reject PUA
6. Else (RejecrJ 1 1 1 ELse reiectlPPA
7. Close marketplace. IEise( '
8. Optimize power delivery schedulefor next day 9. Adj"stpumhm&pmviplan and learn
9. Learning
11. Leoming
2.22 IPPA
2.2.4 PUA
Object of IPPA is to gain more profit:
PmfitqlPPA= PayFmmPUA- PayToPX-CostlnlPP Object of PUA is minimizing its payment. ,The
Knowledge base contains data about generator units' payment is related to the price and consumption schkdule it
status (e.g. power generated and resewed), generating costs, trades in day-ahead retail electricity market.
historical purchase prices of PUAs, tariff of PX, and so on.
Planner dedicates to optimize the generation schedule and
find satisfied cooperant PUAs to maximize its profit.
PayFmmPUA=
H
2 SpotPricehx ConsumePowerh
h;l
Often the value of H is 24 or 48, denoting the division
Pseudocodeof IPPA of a day (His 24 in the example of this paper). PUA may
1. ' Enter the marketplace and calculore the rest rine it could spend on
forecast its consumption of eleitricity every period
tmdr (TieForlPPTrade).
2. Add the delivery @riffto IPPA-KB. ((ConsumePowerh, k 1 . 2 ...H)next day and after
While lbneForlPF'Trade >O , do ( accomplish trade it will get a list of price (SpotPriceh). So
3. Receive demandsf" PUAs andRCAs. its knowledge base contains the provide price data from
If demand <= genemfion cqabiliry( PPAs and RCAs, the consume schedules of itself, the
4. Evalunre and e b a e pmfitabb eollobomrors. and send them
fhe supply plan. payment data io history, and so on. Planner of PUA is also
5. Uthe collo6omtors reply with orderfoms ( an optimization mechanism evaluating the choices among
6. Enquire PXA different power suppliers and adjusting its consume curves
If PXA permits ( to be cost-effective.
7.

Pseudoeodeof PUA:
I. Enter the market and cokulafe the rest timr it could spend
on rude (.lbneForPLJATmde).
While lbneForPUATrade >O ,do(
2. BmpdeaFt demand plan LO IPPAs and RWLs in the
markelploee.
If receive service reply (

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 Proceedqs of the Third International Conference on Machine Laming and Cybernetics, Shanghai, 26-29 August 2004

3. Evolunte rhe replies and choose pmfirobleproviders (denoted by ellipse), transitions (denoted by rectangle), arcs
4. Send onlpr 10 selected providers
If receive cO"lrac1 reply [
(denoted by line with arrowhead) and color tokens. Color
5. Sign rhe eonrmcr) ' token here is a complex data structure;containing the
Else [ communication information of a corresponding agent.
6. Adjusr d e d p l o n and 1 c 3 ~ t 2 The detail-concepts are written in reference [9], we will not
got021 I
1.
8.
Exitmorker
Laming
,
2.3. Interactions of agents

From above, we can see that the agents could leim

from trading experience, and they have their own characters,
which lead each agent to different trading strategies. At the
same time, they could be affected by the actionsheactions
of the 'other agents, and they could leam from the others in
trading procedure. That is to say, each trading agents could
not only leamautonomously (update KB), but also interacts
each other especially on planner. So' the interactions of
agents must be considered as well as internal behaviors in
this agent-based retail .electricity market.
In the proposed system, the interactions among agents
are mostly stem from the agents' guesstimates of the other
competitors' purcbasdprovide price. One triumphal agent
must bring pressure to the other competitors. Those anxious
trading agents may react immediately (as Figure 2 showed,
increasddecrease their bidding soon), comparing to the
agents with the other characters. Analogously, the triumphal
agents are also thinking about how to offer more profitable
price-lists and schedules in the next day-ahead retail
market. Figure 3. Colored Peui net of retail elecI+icily market trading
Those guesstimates and how they 'affect the decisions p d U r e
are the other complex problems that we will present in
another paper later. In the following section, we will exhibit From Figure 3, we could see that designed retail
some of the interactions among the agents in trading electricity market coloredPetri net (RCM-CPN) exhibits a
procedure by,colored Petri nets. .. clear picture of communications and cooperation among
agents in the trading procedure, and from the movements'
: 3. Trading procedure of the retail electricity market of tokens, we could find conflicts (a place with more than
pictured by colored Petri nets one output arcs) easily. And in RCM-CPN, we solved those
conflicts by processes of transitions.
3.1. Trading procedure colored Petri nets In section 3.2, we will illustrate the net how to present
the communications and cooperation among agents in
From above sections, we can s,ee that the trading trading procedure with a representative case (1 PXA, 1
procedure contains . complex communication and RCA, 2 IF'PA and 4 PUAs).
cooperation of agents, which occur randomly and may
interlace with each other, so there exist lots of latent 3.2. Illustration of designed colored Petri net
conflicts. It often leads the developed agent system goes to
a'status of disorder, which confuses trading agents and they At a certain time, assumed 8:OO am, PXA initiates a
could not trade-off or even could not accomplish their day-ahead market by advertising that it is.going to conduct
trading plan. Therefore, we adopt an intuitive modeling tool, a free trade and specifying the close time, assumed 12:OO
colored Petri nets, to picture the trading procedure (see
figure 2).
Colored Petri nets mainly composed of places

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 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Shanghai, 26-29 August 2004
noon. All trading agents interested in participating in the
trade can then join the marketplace and submit bids (put
their tokens to corresponding places). For example, if there
are four PUAs, tow IPPs, one RCA entered the electricity
marketplace at the same time, then PXA broadcast the tariff
of delivery to them, and put the constraints token C into
Constraints place. PUAs offer their schedule containing
that quantity Qh of electricity at an asking price APh for
consume at each hour h next day (those information is
contained in color token D),such that they put four D
tokens ( a d l > , ad2>,<udp and aG)in PowDemand
place. The seller agents, two IPPAs and a RCA, put two S
tokens (<PSI>, <psp) and one S token (asl>)into
SuppPlnn place and PurchPlan place separately. S token
contains the service information. That is the initial
marking"' (&) of this colored Petri net.
Now, Broadcast transition is enabled"' and could
occur. After Broadcast transition occurred, D in its input
place (PowDemand) are all took away, and these four D
tokens are duplicate deposited in the output places
(SuppPlane and ServPlan). Then RCA and IPPs could
receive the demand. They will evaluate and choose to,hid
which ones, that is to say, to service whom. That is to say,
three transitions (PurchReq, ZPPAChoose and PRejectPUA)
are enabled. Supposed that RCA choose to serve IPP2 and
IF'P4, then PuchReq occurred - take away cud2>, <U&>,
<IS> and deposit processed tokens a d z > and ad.+into
SuppPlan. The processed tokens contain the purchase
demand of RCA (purchase quantity Qh of electricity at a
purchase price PPh for delivery at each hour h). And then if
IF'PAI choose to service RCA, and IPP2 choose service
PUAl and PUA2, then ZPPAChoose occurs - take away
a d l > , a d z > , ad.+, adz>, <r&>2, <psl>,<ps2> and
deposit <psi, u d p , <psi, udz> into Orderplan and deposit
<ps2, r d p , <ps2, r&> into ServPlan. Then, PRejectPUA
occurs - take away the frustrated a d 3 > and deposit it into
PUA-KB. It will be adjusted by planner of PUA, and then
be broadcasted to all sellers again.
Now, we find a concurrency of PRejectPUA and
PChoose in the net. But they could not conflict with each
other, because they are under the latent process (choice) of
IPPAs.
Then, there are enough tokens in ServPlan, MatchPUA
could occur - take away <ps2. rdp. <ps2, r&> and deposit
corresponding as2, u d d , as*,ud4> to OrderPlan. a d l >
and < p s p are toke away, and deposit a <psl,udl> into
Orderplan. So PUAI, PUA2 and PUA4 could evaluate the
service plan from RCA and P P I , then choose the most
satisfied for themselves and send orders to each selected
power supplier - URejectZPP, URejectRCA, UOderZPP and
99
UOaerRCA may concurrently occurs. In this case, only
PUA2 has option that select whether IPPl or RCA, for
<psI.ud2> and <rsz,udz> simultaneously existing in
OrderPlan. That is to say, P P 1 and RCA select to service
the same power consumption schedule. Now the conflicts
occur. But in our design, PUA could choose to be served by
who's service plan, not a passive power consumer as in the
traditional power market, so the conflicts are solved by
PUA's choice - either select one of them to satisfy all its
demand or select one supply part of power and the other
supply the rest. For simplify, we assume that PUA2 is a
small user in the power systems, it can but choose one
provider. Supposing that PUAZ and PUA4 finally ordered
the service from RCA, PUAl ordered from P P I ,
UOderIPP and UOderRCA concurrently occurs- take away
<rs2, udp. u s 2 , U@. <psi, u d p , while deposit a d z , rsp,
<U&. rs2> into PmvidPlan, and a d l , ps+ is deposited into
GenPlan.
Then, MatchGen occurs, depositing two tokens ad2,
p s p and a&,ps2> into GenPlan. These tokens are oriented
from a d 2 . rsp and <U&. n2>, processed by MatchGen, for
avoiding letting out the business secrets. All the tokens
(generation plans of IPPAs) must be checked by PXA. Here
we only take account of the grid transmission capability
constraint as an instance ( C represents the capability,
placed in CheckCaPa).
Next, we assume that the order from PUA4 to RCA
has some illegalities, then ZllegalRP could occur- take away
<I&, psp. deposit ad.+to MatchU&P and <ps+ to
ZPPA-KB. Then uQ> is decomposed by RCA, and
deposited into the knowledge base of RCA (RCA-KB)and
PUAs (PUA-KB) separately. On the other side, the
remainder orders are successfully checked by CheckCapa
transition, which is utilized to ensure that if the power
delivery request is over load. After that, IPPl and IPP2 will
sign contract with PUAl and RCA separately, and the
relative transmission capability and < C ~ , ~ Z
whose
>,
subscript denotes the relation ship of power consumer and
provider) is subtracted (take away from CheckCapa).
Finally, RCA match the pair of PUA and IPPA, and sign a
contract with corresponding PUA2.
Up to now, part of the trading contents (<udl> and
a d z > ) are accomplished, the remainder parts will be
adjusted by their trading agents and then be traded again. In
fact, as our proposed example process goes on, the other
trade contents are executed in parallel. We only elaborate
one assumes occur sequence, which could be expressed by
the following:
&:P,,Denond=(<ud,>.<ud2>.<ud3,<ud3J
SuppPlon=(<ps,>.<psz>)
ServPlnn=(us,>)
M i PowDenond=(<uds-,<)
EritMorker= (<ud,>.cud,>, <pst>,<ps~>,us,>)
 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Machine Laming and Cybernetics, Shanghai, 26-29 August 2004
occur step f” MOto I&:
S,=(Bm?dcnstJ
SZ=[PurchReq. IPPAChoose, PRejectPUA)
S~=(MorchPUAQUALeom,UOderlPP,OderRCA)
S.=(MatchCen, ReqCheck)
Ss=(IllegolRP. SignPUA, SignRC4 1 -
&={MarchP&LI.IPPALeam, RSginPUA)
SFIRCALeam.PUALeamI
The sequence is only one of the numerous possible
trading sequences, which is not controllable and arises
randomly. Each time our agent-based market model
program executed, the final trading outcome variant. But
the more times it executed; the better the results gained -
less execution time, more profit (less cost) trading agents
get (spend).
4. Conclusions
In this paper we have developed a prototype to show
how fusion agents and colored Petri nets technology to
model a retail electricity marketplace. This demonstration is
not meant to be a prototype of an actual marketplace.
Because of budget and schedule constraints, the scope of
this demonstration is quite limited. But the research has
shown that fusion of colored Petri nets technology and
intelligent agents could provide a powerful problem-solving
mechanism that is ideally suited for use in the retail
electricity market, and it is easily to be extended to general
retail marketplace.
Because the new restructured and deregulated power
systems will utilize network communications and the
Internet extensively, so our model is easy to be transferred
and implemented in real power systems. Though our
proposed retail electricity market has complicated
information communications and processes, it could bring
modem power system powerful activities.
In summary this research has shown:
* Retail electricity market is vivid. It gives the
participants more free choices and could benefit them all.
* Agent-based model could fully simulate and
implement the behaviors, guesstimates, discursions. and
interactions of each participants in our designed‘retail
electricity market.
* Colored Petri net show good performance in
presenting the communications and cooperation of agents.
And the trading procedure could be described in an intuitive
graphical way, which exhibits the concurrencies and
conflicts latent in the procedure clearly.
The fusion of colored Petri nets and agent approach is
promising. But there are still lots of works we should do in
the future: How to fully utilize the formal analysis methods
by which propelties of CPN can be proved, thereby
improving the agents properties; Appling mobile agent to
100
implement the trade in a distributed way; Further studying
the other latent problems in communication and
cooperation of agents, then implementing a more robust
trading system.
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