We study merchant energy production modeled as a compound switching and timing option. The resulting Markov decision process is intractable. State-of-the-art approximate dynamic programming methods applied to realistic instances of this model yield policies with large optimality gaps that are...

Merchant energy trading companies manage conversion assets to exploit price differences across time, space, and sources of energy in the face of energy futures term structure risk. Financial hedging of this risk is standard practice. Market incompleteness, such as limited futures liquidity,...

We study merchant energy production modeled as a compound switching and timing option. The resulting Markov decision process is intractable. Least squares Monte Carlo combined with information relaxation and duality is a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methodology to obtain operating...