Join Us!
Will your broker win the 2020 Power TAC tournament?
Last summer’s tournament and PASS workshop seems like it was yesterday. We’re still amazed at your good humor during Cologne’s heat wave. But the chilly temps now remind us it’s time to take away some insights from the competitive strategies that worked – and those that didn’t – and get to work on your 2020 broker.
Competition Schedule 2020
Trial rounds in late April and May help broker developers work out communication and interaction issues:
Trial 1 : April 20 – May 1, 2020 [Registration]
Trial 2 : May 25 – June 5, 2020 [Registration]
Qualifying : June 15 – June 26, 2020 [Registration]
Finals : 2 July – 17 July, 2020
The game specification is 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 July 23 & 24
Are you a computational IS researcher? Consider participating in or presenting at our summer 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 on July 23 & 24 2020.
Power TAC tournament participants are particularly welcome to submit abstracts. The workshop will kick-off with a networking dinner on Thursday July 23. The main workshop will take place on the 24th and all participants will be provided accommodations for one night. There is no registration fee, however, space is limited and will be provided on first come, first served basis.
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 July 2 – 17. 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