TacTex'13: A Champion Adaptive Power Trading Agent

Sustainable energy systems of the future could no longer rely on the current paradigm that energy supply follows demand. Since many of the renewable energy resources do not produce power on demand, there is a need for new market structures that motivate sustainable behaviors by participants. The Power Trading Agent Competition (Power TAC) is a new annual competition that focuses on the design and operation of future retail power markets, specifically in smart grid environments with renewable energy production, smart metering, and autonomous agents acting on behalf of customers and retailers. Its purpose is to help researchers understand the dynamics of customer and retailer decision-making, as well as the robustness of proposed market designs. This research contributes to the former, by introducing TacTex'13, the champion agent from the inaugural competition in 2013. TacTex'13 learns and adapts to the environment in which it operates, by heavily relying on reinforcement-learning and prediction methods. We formalize the complex decisionmaking problem that TacTex'13 faces, and approximate its solution in TacTex'13's constituent components. We examine the success of the complete agent through analysis of competition results.