Intelligent Power Trading Agent

BACKGROUND :
In the future, we envisioned that the energy market can be as free as the cellular market. Today, we can change our phone operator relatively easy: Orange to SwissCom, SwissCom to Sunrise, etc. In the future, the same thing is envisioned to happen also in the energy market, where the customer can change easily their energy provider.

On the one hand, this condition is advantageous for customers since their energy supply become more competitive (price and quality). On the other hand, this pose a serious challenge to energy providers. In order to generate revenue, they should understand their customers, and at the same time, their competitors. Power Trading Agent Competition (Power TAC) is designed and built exactly for this purpose. It models the future energy markets, and can be used to study about what happen in the market.

THIS PROJECT :
In this project, our task is to develop an (intelligent) agent who act as an energy broker (=energy provider) aiming at making profit through offering electricity tariffs to customers (and trading energy in the market). We do not need to develop everything from scratch. The system, PowerTAC, is publicly available (see http://www.powertac.org/). There is also a sample broker ready for you. Thus our task is to make this sample not-so-intelligent broker become an intelligent broker.

If you have any question, just drop us an email, or come to our office:

• Tri Kurniawan Wijaya (BC147): [email protected]
• Matteo Vasirani (BC114): [email protected]

Prerequisites

• a fan of Artificial Intelligence
• familiar with Java programming language

Possible starting date: asap.