Tournament | PowerTAC

Join Us!

Will your broker win the 2021 Power TAC tournament?

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!

Competition Schedule 2021

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.

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 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.

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 2021 tournament will be 1.8.0 or later; if you are preparing for the 2021 competition you can also run a development snapshot. Our nabble list 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:

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

PowerTAC Partners

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

Previous Competitions

2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012

Power TAC 2020 Final Ranking

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

TUC TAC
Mertacor
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:

Mertacor
AgentUDE
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:

AgentUDE
VidyutVanika
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:

AgentUDE
fimtac
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:

maxon16
COLDPower
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:

Maxon15
TacTex
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:

AgentUDE
cwiBroker
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:

TacTex
cwiBroker
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.

Dorothy.Grandia@ewi.uni-koeln.de