[AISWorld] International E-Energy Market Challenge - Call for Papers

[Christoph Flath]

Call for papers

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 First International E-Energy Market Challenge

http://www.im.uni-karlsruhe.de/ieemc
ieemc at iism.uni-karlsruhe.de

To be held at the
8th International Conference on
Autonomic Computing and Communications
http://www.cis.fiu.edu/conferences/icac2011/ 

18th June 2011, Karlsruhe, Germany
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Important Dates: 

Paper submission deadline:	March 31, 2011
Notification of acceptance:	April 15, 2011
Camera ready paper:		May 15, 2011
Workshop:			June 18, 2011


Introduction
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Today's power grid control and dispatch strategies mainly rely on centralized control centers that manage a limited number of large power plants such that their output meets the fluctuating energy demands in real time. The need for a transition to renewable energy sources leads to a quickly increasing share of small energy generators with intermittent generation timelines.
In combination with smart energy consumers that change their demand patterns over time, the purely centralized approach to power grid control becomes more and more difficult to maintain.
Hence, a more flexible, decentralized, and self-organizing control infrastructure must be developed that can be actively managed to balance both the large grid as a whole, as well as the many lower voltage sub-grids with its many small energy generators (e.g. photovoltaic installations or combined-heat- and-power combustion engines). There will be a strong need for agents acting autonomously on behalf of their stakeholders.
The clever use of concepts from autonomic and organic computing as well as from multi-agent systems and from economics will be essential for developing efficient systems.

One candidate for such a new control infrastructure is an energy market at the retail level, i.e. at the level of currently completely passive and unmanaged (low-voltage) distribution grids. To help mitigate the risk of instituting such markets in the real world, agent-based simulations of such markets can provide important insights. Workshop participants are thus invited to join in a program of economic modeling and simulations to understand and experiment with retail energy markets.

Topics of interest
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The workshop focuses on the design, realization and evaluation of simulations. We are especially interested in novel decision- making algorithms, game-theoretic models and analyses, innovative technical designs as well as machine learning frameworks in the context of multi-agent settings within the energy domain.

Retail level energy markets have a huge potential to meet the challenges which the structural change towards renewable, intermittent energy generators poses to electricity networks all over the world. At the same time such local markets are characterized by a multitude of different actors such as households, electric vehicle owners or commercial customers.
Conventional optimization techniques such (e.g. dynamic
programming) are hardly implementable within such diverse and complex systems. In contrast competitive market simulations thrive within such settings and thus offer a way to design and test retail energy markets prior to a real world implementation.

We, moreover, want to present and discuss a competitive test bed environment for agent-based simulations along the lines of the well-established trading agent competitions. This trading agent competition for energy markets (Power TAC) is supposed to facilitate research and development of appropriate retail energy market structures along with corresponding software agents that can support or even automate decision making in these markets.
This environment will model a market-based management structure for local and regional energy networks at multiple levels of complexity. It will closely model reality by using real historic data on energy production and consumption, weather, and consumer preferences. A more detailed description of the competition is available online at powertac.org. We hope to run a live competition at the workshop.

Submissions and further information
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We are interested in both theoretical as well as implementation -oriented papers on agent-based simulation systems for energy markets. Papers should be around 10 pages including the text, figures and references.

Papers must be formatted according to the ACM proceedings format and can be submitted via the EasyChair submission system:

https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=ieemc11

Further instructions for submissions are available on the website.

The workshop is co-located with the 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC). ICAC2011 will be held in Karlsruhe, Germany from the 14th-18th of June. The IEEMC workshop will be held on the 18th of June.

For questions, send your email to: ieemc at iism.uni-karlsruhe.de 

Organizing committee
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* Christof Weinhardt, KIT
* Wolfgang Ketter, RSM
* Lilia Filipova-Neumann, FZI
* Anke Weidlich, SAP Research

Program committee
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* Carsten Block, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
* John Collins, University of Minnesota
* Hellmuth Frey, EnBW
* Christoph Flath, FZI
* Steven Kimbrough, Wharton School of Business
* Steffen Lamparter, Siemens
* Detlev Schumann, IBM
* Orestis Terzidis, SAP Research
* Clemens van Dinther, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
* Harald Vogt, SAP Research