Electronic multilateral trade of electricity

This paper presents a technical approach for electronic multilateral trade of electricity in competitive power industries. The trade involves strategic sharing of data among agents in an attempt to provide the opportunity to intelligently discover competitive behavior of peer suppliers. A trading logic is implemented as a specialized software module within the agent. The logic mimics intelligence of the human strategic trade. A time-bounded trade protocol has been introduced as a trading basis among rivalry trade agents in the market. The protocol limits the trade rounds in order to bind the trading process to specific deadlines. The protocol is coded as part of the automated trade server. The results of a generic 3-bus test system show that the electronic multilateral trade logic presented in this paper better distributes market sales, lowers prices and consequently provides higher social welfare compared to the standard Cournot economic model that may be used by the human decision-maker for market trading. Based on a set of test cases with different load profiles, it is noted that the electronic multilateral trade drives the market price closer to the marginal cost of generation supply and far away from the estimated Cournot price