Agent Modelling
Electricity in England and Wales is sold via the Electricity Pool. The market in electricity cannot operate like a commodity market by matching buyers to sellers, since once power is on the National Grid it is impossible to trace its source, i.e. you cannot match sellers, those companies generating electricity, to buyers, the Regional Electricity Companies (RECs), who supply electricty to the public. Instead, electricty is pooled, and the generating companies make a daily "offer bid" to produce electricity.
The price the generators are paid for the units of electricity they produce and the quantity they are allowed to add to the pool is set daily by a complex bidding system also administered by the NGC. The price the suppliers (the RECs) have to pay for the power bought from the Pool is dependent on the price paid to the generators and the costs involved in maintaining and operating the transmission network.
The first stage of this research involved specifying a simplified market model, and using a simple rule based adaptive system to see how the agents ineracted. We used a simple classifier system, acting in the environment illustrated below, an a simplified scheduling algorithm in our initial model.
An analysis of the results from this model and certain more complex models will be prepared in the new year. The model was implemented with an X-Motif interface. Screenshots of two of the windows are displayed below.
An example of a schedule for a half hour time slot
The internal rules of a particular agent
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