Agent-based Model for Market Oriented Planning of Electricity Generation Expansion

Generation Expansion Planning (GEP) has been a significant issue for not only the regulator but also the market participants. The generators should adapt strategies at stage of long-term capacity adjustment and stage of operation for pursuing improvement of their profit. The regulator should anticipate market failure and give incentives to capacity investment. In the competitive Electricity market, individual actor makes its own planning taking into account the strategies of other actors. There is a need of a novel model that could include games theoretical assumptions as well as other more complex assumptions. Agent-based Simulation (ABS) offers this possibility. This paper proposes a new multi-agent model specifically designed to support planning activities in decentralized electricity markets. The agents are created and interactions among them are simulated at the planning level and the operation level. Synthetic agents are designed allowing flexible representations of the multi-functional market players and possible mergers and coalitions. The proposed model is applied to an illustrative system. The market outcomes provide a vision for different actors in the market. They can be further used from various perspective, e.g. for assisting the regulator on ensuring security of supply or for aiding a producer agent on new capacity investment decision.