Multi-agent power market simulation using EMCAS

Countries around the world continue to restructure their electricity markets and open them up to competition and private investors in pursuit of economic efficiency and new capital investment. However, the recent volatility exhibited by many restructured power markets, in combination with several prominent market failures, have highlighted the need for a better understanding of the complex interactions between the various market participants and the emerging overall market behavior. Advanced modeling approaches are needed that simulate the behavior of electricity markets over time and model how market participants may act and react to changes in the underlying economic, financial, and regulatory environments. This is particularly useful for developing sound market rules that will allow these markets to function properly. A new and promising approach is to model electricity markets as complex adaptive systems using an agent-based modeling and simulation approach, such as is implemented in the electricity market complex adaptive system (EMCAS) software. EMCAS provides an agent-based framework to capture and investigate the complex interactions between the physical infrastructures and the economic behavior of market participants that are a trademark of the newly emerging markets. This paper describes the EMCAS agents, their interactions, the unique insights obtained from agent-based models, and discusses current model applications in several U.S., Asian, and European markets.