Join Us!
Will your broker win the 2020 Power TAC tournament?
Last summer’s tournament and PASS workshop seems like it was years ago. We’re still impressed at your good humor during Cologne’s heat wave. Who would have imagined then that a pandemic would throw off our tournament schedule in 2020? We’re hoping that first trial earlier this year taught you a lot, because now you’ll have plenty of time to make adjustments for the 2nd – 4th trials. If your team didn’t participate in the first trial, no worries! You can still form a team and compete in the trials and tournament.
Competition Schedule 2020
Trial rounds in July, August, and September help broker developers work out communication and interaction issues:
Trial 2 : July 6 – 10, 2020 [Registration]
Trial 3 : August 10 – 14, 2020 [Registration]
Trial 4 : September 14 – 18, 2020 [Registration]
Qualifying : October 12 – 23, 2020 [Registration]
Finals : November 2 – 13, 2020
In the release of Power TAC version 1.7.0 for the 2020 competition, customers have become a bit skeptical about unreasonably high prices in regulation rates. Details are in Section 4.1.1 of the updated 2020 specification. In other aspects, the specification remains unchanged, so agents from the previous two years should operate without problems. Game data from 2018 and 2019 can be used for training. Some customer populations may be enlarged or reconfigured, so overall demand and detailed demand profiles may differ from earlier competitions. As in previous competitions, competitors will be required to have two copies of their agents running and available to connect during the entire duration of the qualifying and final rounds.
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.
2020 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’re looking for new dates and will let you know asap.
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 2020 tournament finals will be held on November 2 – 13. 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 2019 tournament will be 1.6.0 or later; if you are preparing for the 2019 competition you can also run a development snapshot.
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
and then follow the instructions for installing the Power TAC server and building a broker agent:
PowerTAC Partners
This project was created with the cooperation of the following affiliations:
Dorothy.Grandia@ewi.uni-koeln.de
+31 (0) 6 2454 0859