Bilateral Negotiation in a Multi-Agent Energy Market

Energy markets are systems for effecting the purchase and sale of electricity using supply and demand to set the price. A typical energy market involves a wholesale market for electricity generation, when competing generators offer their electricity output to retailers, and a retail market for electricity retailing, when end-use customers choose their supplier from competing electricity retailers. This paper addresses the challenges created by competitive energy markets towards ensuring the full benefits of deregulation. It presents a multi-agent energy market composed of multiple autonomous computational agents, each responsible for one or more market functions, and each interacting with other agents in the execution of their responsibilities. Additionally, the paper presents a negotiation model for autonomous agents. The model handles bilateral multi-issue negotiation and formalizes a set of negotiation strategies studied in the social sciences and frequently used by human negotiators.