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Congratulations to VidyutVanika!

Winners of the 2022 PowerTac tournament

Join Us!

Join Us!

Will your broker win the 2022 Power TAC tournament?

We are optimists. That means we are counting on an in-person PASS workshop in 2022, when we can all get together again. Power TAC can predict a lot, but it can’t predict what kind of COVID restrictions you might experience in your corner of the big blue marble in 2022. The good news? Power TAC lives in a virtual world, so the tournament can never be quarantined! Everyone is welcome to compete. The game specification is unchanged from the 2021 tournament. Register your team here.

Notices on updates to the competition will be released soon. In the meantime, spread the word about Power TAC to potential competitors far and wide and let’s make this year’s competition the biggest yet!

Competition Schedule 2022

Trial rounds in June, July, and August help broker developers work out communication and interaction issues. 

We need to modify the schedule of trials leading up to the 2022 tournament. As some of you have no doubt noticed, we have not yet released a 2022 version of the Power TAC server. We are working hard to finish up a new customer model that will represent several thousand EV chargers located in residential areas, so minimum demand in late morning, maximum in evening hours.

As we locate usable data for chargers located in other areas, we’ll add them, but probably not before this year’s tournament. As a result, we don’t expect to release the 2022 server until some time in July. Therefore, we plan to run the June trial the week of 20 June using the 2021 server, and then run three additional trials starting 18 July, 15 August, and 12 September with the new server.

Trial 1 :  June 20 – 24, 2022 [Registration]

Trial 2:  July 18 – 22, 2022 [Registration]

Trial 3 : August 15 – 19, 2022 [Registration]

Trial 3 : September 12 – 16, 2022 [Registration]

Qualifying : November 8 – 16, 2022 [Registration]

Finals: December 6 – 14, 2022

If you’re new to the Power TAC community, the tournament is a competitive simulation of future retail electric power markets, in which retail "brokers" buy and sell power in both wholesale and retail markets. The wholesale market is an abstraction of typical day-ahead markets in North America and Europe, and the retail market is a tariff market, in which customers are able to choose among tariff contract offerings from the competing brokers. Customers are models of household, business, electric vehicle and institutional users of electric power, as well as small-scale producers of power that own solar arrays or small wind turbines.

2023 PASS workshop 

Are you a computational IS researcher? Consider participating in or presenting at our workshop! Policy, Awareness, Sustainability and Systems: Next Generation Research Challenges for Computation IS Research in Energy, Mobility and the Sustainable Economy at the Department of Information Systems for Sustainable Society, University of Cologne. The dates of the PASS 2023 workshop are TBD  – interested presenters should send an extended abstract (max. 5 pages) to Wolf Ketter (ketter@wiso.uni-koeln.de) and Saber Talari (talari@wiso.uni-koeln.de).

 

 

 

Forming a Team

Forming a Team

We suggest cross-discipline teams if possible, with strong developers and team members with experience or interest in economics and trading, machine learning, and/or energy domain knowledge.

The 2022 tournament finals will be held from December 6 – 14. If you’d like more information on participation, please contact us.

Scroll down to see tournament history, winning teams and partners.

Broker Developers

The fundamental starting point for broker development strategy is to look at the behaviour and performance of other brokers from past tournaments. You can also download existing brokers and run them against your own agents. The version for the 2022 tournament will be 1.9.0 or later; if you are preparing for the 2022 competition you can also run a development snapshot. Our google group is where broker developers can go to ask questions and discuss tech issues, and where new releases are announced.

Power TAC Broker Repository

Get Going!

After you put a team together, read the background on Power TAC in these three research papers:

Power TAC: A competitive economic simulation of the smart grid

A Multiagent Competitive Gaming Platform to Address Societal Challenges

Competitive Benchmarking: An IS Research Approach to Address Wicked Problems with Big Data and Analytics

and then follow the instructions for installing the Power TAC server and building a broker agent:

The Power TAC wiki

Power TAC Partners

Power TAC Partners

This project was created with the cooperation of the following affiliations:

  • Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
  • Carnegie Mellon University
  • Universität Duisburg Essen
  • Universität zu Köln
  • University of Minnesota
  • RSM Erasmus University
  • TU Delft
  • University of Texas at Austin
  • University of Zagreb
Previous Competitions

Previous Competitions

Power TAC 2022 Final Ranking

The ranking for the 2022 Power TAC competition was as follows:

  1. VidyutVanika/International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India
  2. TUC TAC22/Technical University of Crete, Greece
  3. Mertacor22/Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Detailed results can be found here.

A machine-readable version can be found in the CSV file, including a DOI per game.

Schedule

The 2022 finals were held from December 6 – 14, with trial rounds in June through September and qualifying rounds in November.

 

Power TAC 2021 Final Ranking

The ranking for the 2021 Power TAC competition was as follows:

  1. VidyutVanika/International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India
  2. TUC TAC/Technical University of Crete, Greece
  3. CrocodileAgent/University of Zagreb, Croatia

The detailed results can be found here.

A machine-readable version can be found in the CSV file, including a DOI per game.

Schedule

The 2021 finals were held from October 11 – 27, with trial rounds in June, July and August and qualifying rounds in September.

 

Power TAC 2020 Final Ranking

The ranking for the 2020 Power TAC competition was as follows:

  1. TUC TAC
  2. Mertacor
  3. CrocodileAgent

The detailed results can be found here.

A machine-readable version can be found in the CSV file, including a DOI per game.

Schedule

The 2020 finals were held from November 2 – 13, with trial rounds in July, August and September and qualifying rounds in October.

 

Power TAC 2019 Final Ranking

The ranking for the 2019 Power TAC competition was as follows:

  1. Mertacor
  2. AgentUDE
  3. CrocodileAgent

The detailed results can be found here.

A machine-readable version can be found in the CSV file, including a DOI per game.

Schedule

The 2019 finals were held from July 2 – 16, with trial rounds in May and qualifying rounds in June.

 

Power TAC 2018 Final Ranking

The ranking for the 2018 Power TAC competition was as follows:

  1. AgentUDE
  2. VidyutVanika
  3. CrocodileAgent

The detailed results can be found here.

A machine-readable version can be found in the CSV file, including a DOI per game.

Schedule

The schedule for the 2018 competition was

Trial 1: May 14 – May 25, 2018.
Trial 2: June 4 – June 15, 2018.
Qualification rounds: June 25 – July 6, 2018.
Finals: July 16 – July 27, 2018.

Game Specification

The Power TAC 2018 game specification was released on December 13, 2017.

Changes for 2018 are focused on stability, on simplifying interaction with the balancing market, and on encouraging more vigorous competition, and are highlighted by change bars in the margins. See Sections 3.1.2, 6, and 8.5 for details.

Power TAC 2017 Final Ranking

The ranking for the 2017 Power TAC competition was as follows:

  1. AgentUDE
  2. fimtac
  3. SPOT

The detailed results can be found here.

A machine-readable version can be found in the CSV file, including a DOI per game.

Schedule

The schedule for the 2017 competition was

Trial 1: March 27 – March 31, 2017.
Trial 2: April 18 – April 25, 2017.
Qualification rounds: May 15 – May 17, 2017.
Finals: June 12 – June 21, 2017.

Game Specification

The Power TAC 2017 game specification was released on February 13, 2017.

Changes for 2017 are focused on a more realistic wholesale market, reducing the market power of brokers by making the simulation scenario into a relatively small part of a larger market, and are highlighted by change bars in the margins. See Section 5.3 for details.

Power TAC 2016 Final Ranking

The ranking for the 2016 Power TAC competition was as follows:

  1. maxon16
  2. COLDPower
  3. AgentUDE

The detailed results can be found here.

A machine-readable version can be found in the CSV file, including a DOI per game.

Schedule

The schedule for the 2016 competition was

Qualification rounds: May 17 – April 25, 2016.
Seeding round: June 1 – June 15, 2016.
Finals: June 30 – July 6, 2016.

Game Specification

The Power TAC 2016 competition game specification was released on January 12, 2016.

The primary change from previous competitions is in the assessment of distribution costs. In previous competitions, brokers were charged for transported energy. This mechanism provides no incentive for brokers to manage peak demand and is a poor model of real-world costs. Starting with server version 1.3.1, brokers will pay for customer connections and for their contributions to peak-demand events. In addition, brokers will see higher costs for balancing services, eliminating the possibility of a perverse incentive to carry a "short" market position into the current timeslot. More information is available in Section 7 of the specification.

Power TAC 2015 Final Ranking

The ranking for the 2015 Power TAC competition was as follows:

  1. Maxon15
  2. TacTex
  3. CUHKTac

The detailed results can be found here.

A machine-readable version can be found in the CSV file, including a DOI per game.

Schedule

The schedule for the 2015 competition was

Qualification rounds: April 8 – April 17, 2015.
Finals: April 27 – April 30, 2015.

Game Specification

The Power TAC 2015 game specification is nearly the same as for Power TAC 2014, except for the treatment of negative tariff signup payments.

Power TAC 2014 Final Ranking

The ranking for the 2014 Power TAC competition was as follows:

  1. AgentUDE
  2. cwiBroker
  3. Crocodile Agent

Schedule

The schedule for the 2014 competition was

Trial 1: February 6 – February 10, 2014.
Trial 2: March 25 – March 28, 2014.
Qualification rounds: April 22 – April 30, 2014.
Finals: May 5 – May 6, 2014.

Game Specification

The 2014 Game Specification is available here.

Power TAC 2013 Final Ranking

The ranking for the 2013 Power TAC competition was as follows:

  1. TacTex
  2. cwiBroker
  3. MILLBroker

Schedule

The schedule for the 2013 competition was

Trial 1: March 18 – March 22, 2013.
Trial 2: April 22 – April 26, 2013.
Trial 3: May 28 – May 31, 2013.
Trial 4: June 19 – June 22, 2013.
Qualification rounds: July 8 – July 11, 2013.
Finals: July 15 – July 16, 2013.

Game Specification

The 2013 Game Specification is available here.

Power TAC 2012 Pilot Trials

We started Power TAC in 2012 with a series of pilot trials which began the process of building the robust, growing simulation platform it is today.

Inaugural Competitors

Mertacor (Aristotle University, Thessaloniki)

CrocodileAgent (Zagreb University)

LARGEPower (Rotterdam School of Management)

KAIST_TAC (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)

TacTex (University of Texas at Austin)

AstonTAC (Aston University, UK)

SotonPower (University of Southampton, UK)

Maxon (Westfaelische Hochschule)

Schedule

The schedule for the 2012 competition was

1st round: May 2012
Demonstration rounds: June 4 – June 5, 2012.
2nd round: September 24 – September 27, 2012.
3rd round: November 30 – December 7, 2012.

Game Specification

The 2012 Game Specification is available here.

Contact Us

powertac.energy@gmail.com