A multi-agent based negotiation support system for cost allocation of cross-border transmission

Abstract

Regulation and protection have been the major issues to prevent the consumers from enjoying good quality of service (QoS) at reasonable prices, for example, electricity and long distance call service. Deregulation in such industries started in early 1970s and have achieved significant results in, for example, telecommunication industry. The deregulation in telecommunication was mainly focused on reducing the market power to add more competition to reduce the price and to improve QoS. Similarly, the power industry in several countries also underwent regulation. The power industry used to be protected and regulated. Consumers were forced to buy electricity from particular suppliers and suffered high prices and low QoS. After deregulation, the original boundary lines have been removed and consumers have more alternatives. How to support optimal planning of cross-border electricity trade has become an important issue since then. Decentralization, or participants have the rights to participate in decision making, is one of the directions of deregulation. In this paper a decentralized structure is suggested to solve the problem by using multi-agent technology to create autonomy for each participant. In such structure the centralization of information transmission or decision making is prevented. Each participant behaves rationally to search for best benefit or payoff through the information she or he owns or through information exchange with other participants. Although all the market participants make decisions to protect their own benefits, the optimal solution (total costs) of the whole system can be achieved finally. This structure is based on the method proposed in [5] and implementation, which a multiagent system called Multi-Agent System for Cross-Border Trade (MASCBT), was done by using Java programming language. A demonstration on a 5-area test system shows that the suggested new approach is effective and promising.