Το work with title Aiming for half gets you to the top: winning PowerTAC 2020 by Orfanoudakis Stavros, Kontos Stefanos, Akasiadis Charilaos, Chalkiadakis Georgios is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Bibliographic Citation
S. Orfanoudakis, S. Kontos, C. Akasiadis and G. Chalkiadakis, “Aiming for half gets you to the top: winning PowerTAC 2020,” in Multi-Agent Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, A. Rosenfeld, N. Talmon, Eds., Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021, pp. 144–159, doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-82254-5_9.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82254-5_9
The PowerTAC competition provides a multi-agent simulation platform for electricity markets, in which intelligent agents acting as electricity brokers compete with each other aiming to maximize their profits. Typically, the gains of agents increase as the number of their customers rises, but in parallel, costs also increase as a result of higher transmission fees that need to be paid by the electricity broker. Thus, agents that aim to take over a disproportionately high share of the market, often end up with losses due to being obliged to pay huge transmission capacity fees. In this paper, we present a novel trading strategy that, based on this observation, aims to balance gains against costs; and was utilized by the champion of the PowerTAC-2020 tournament, TUC-TAC. The approach also incorporates a wholesale market strategy that employs Monte Carlo Tree Search to determine TUC-TAC’s best course of action when participating in the market’s double auctions. The strategy is improved by making effective use of a forecasting module that seeks to predict upcoming peaks in demand, since in such intervals incurred costs significantly increase. A post-tournament analysis is also included in this paper, to help draw important lessons regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the various strategies used in the PowerTAC-2020 competition.