Finals October 11 - 27
This year’s theme is 'the more, the merrier'! Who knows whether restrictions on large gatherings will hold throughout the year, but in the virtual world, everyone is welcome to the party. The game specification is unchanged from the 2020 tournament.
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!
Trial rounds in June, July, and August help broker developers work out communication and interaction issues:
Trial 1: June 21 – 25
Trial 2: July 26 – 30
Trial 3 : August 23 – 27
Qualifying : September 20 – October 1
Finals : October 11 – 27
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.
2021 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 Energy Economics Institute, University of Cologne. We will let you know dates asap.
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 2021 tournament finals will be held from October 11 – 27. If you’d like more information on participation, please contact us.
Scroll down to see tournament history, winning teams and partners.
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 2021 tournament will be 1.8.0 or later; if you are preparing for the 2021 competition you can also run a development snapshot.
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
and then follow the instructions for installing the Power TAC server and building a broker agent:
This project was created with the cooperation of the following affiliations:
Dorothy.Grandia@ewi.uni-koeln.de