Sustainable energy systems of the future will need more than efficient, clean, low-cost, renewable energy sources; they will also need efficient price signals that motivate sustainable energy consumption as well as a better real-time alignment of energy demand and supply.

An autonomous trading agent is a complex piece of software that must operate in a competitive economic environment and support a research agenda. We describe the structure of decision processes in the MinneTAC trading agent, focusing on the use of evaluators – configurable, composable modules...

Many enterprises that participate in dynamic markets need to make product pricing and inventory resource utilization decisions in real-time. We describe a family of statistical models that address these needs by combining characterization of the economic environment with the ability to predict...

This is the specification for the Power Trading Agent Competition for 2012 (Power TAC 2012). Power TAC is a competitive simulation that models a “liberalized” retail electrical energy market, where competing business entities or “brokers” offer energy services to customers through tariff...

An effective Decision Support System (DSS) should help its users improve decision-making in complex, information-rich, environments. We present a feature gap analysis that shows that current decision support technologies lack important qualities for a new generation of agile business models that...

We show how an autonomous agent can use observable market conditions to characterize the microeconomic situation of the market and predict future market trends. The agent can use this information to make both tactical decisions, such as pricing, and strategic decisions, such as product mix and...

This is the specification for the Power Trading Agent Competition for 2013 (Power TAC 2013). Power TAC is a competitive simulation that models a “liberalized” retail electrical energy market, where competing business entities or “brokers” offer energy services to customers through tariff...

We present a computational approach that autonomous software agents can adopt to make tactical decisions, such as product pricing, and strategic decisions, such as product mix and production planning, to maximize profit in markets with supply and demand uncertainties. Using a combination of...

The energy sector will undergo fundamental changes over the next ten years. Prices for fossil energy resources are continuously increasing, there is an urgent need to reduce CO2 emissions, and the United States and European Union are strongly motivated to become more independent from foreign...

This is the specification for the Power Trading Agent Competition for 2011 (Power TAC 2011). Agents are simulations of electrical power brokers, who must compete with each other for both power production and consumption, and manage their portfolios.