Dynamic Testing of Wholesale Power Market Designs: An Open-Source Agent-Based Framework

In April 2003 the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed a complicated market design—the Wholesale Power Market Platform (WPMP)—for common adoption by all US wholesale power markets. Versions of the WPMP have been implemented in New England, New York, the mid-Atlantic states, the Midwest, the Southwest, and California. Strong opposition to the WPMP persists among some industry stakeholders, however, due largely to a perceived lack of adequate performance testing. This study reports on the model development and open-source implementation (in Java) of a computational wholesale power market organized in accordance with core WPMP features and operating over a realistically rendered transmission grid. The traders within this market model are strategic profit-seeking agents whose learning behaviors are based on data from human-subject experiments. Our key experimental focus is the complex interplay among structural conditions, market protocols, and learning behaviors in relation to short-term and longer-term market performance. Findings for a dynamic 5-node transmission grid test case are presented for concrete illustration. This article is an abridged version of Sun and Tesfatsion ST07a