Price-based Market Clearing under Marginal Pricing: a Bilevel Programming Approach

Market clearing in restructured power systems is mostly implemented through an offer-based setting with the goal of maximizing social welfare. This approach leads to sound results from an economic viewpoint when generation offers reflect true production costs. However, offers may significantly differ from actual costs in practice, thus yielding undesired distortion. Under a marginal pricing scheme, this paper presents a general bilevel programming formulation for alternative market-clearing procedures dependent on market-clearing prices rather than on offers. The resulting nonlinear mixed-integer bilevel programming formulation is transformed into an equivalent single-level mixed-integer linear program suitable for efficient off-the-shell software. The bilevel formulation is investigated through a particular instance of price-based market clearing driven by consumer payment minimization. This problem has recently received considerable attention due to the open challenges posed from both modeling and computational perspectives. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.