An agent-based negotiation method for bilateral contracts of energy

In this paper, an agent-based negotiation method for bilateral contracts of energy is proposed. We construct similarity trees for the seller and buyer agents based on their preferences in the market, and then through a paring process find the most suitable pairs of sellers and buyers to negotiate for signing bilateral contracts. We continue this process until there are no buyers left in the market (assuming that there are more sellers in the market than buyers). Then the remaining sellers are ranked as the secondary candidates for negotiation with similar buyers and this process goes on until all the sellers are ranked for their similar buyers. After sorting the list of possible sellers for each buyer, the negotiation process between that buyer and its potential sellers begins through a time-constrained protocol. The communication and interaction media for the buyer and seller agents is a developed software package with visual C++ language. A case study is presented to show the applicability of the proposed method for bilateral contracts