Bidding in Periodic Double Auctions Using Heuristics and Dynamic Monte Carlo Tree Search

Moinul Morshed Porag Chowdhury, Christopher Kiekintveld, Son Tran, William Yeoh

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Main track. Pages 166-172.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/23

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Abstract

In a Periodic Double Auction (PDA), there are multiple discrete trading periods for a single type of good. PDAs are commonly used in real-world energy markets to trade energy in specific time slots to balance demand on the power grid. Strategically, bidding in a PDA is complicated because the bidder must predict and plan for future auctions that may influence the bidding strategy for the current auction. We present a general bidding strategy for PDAs based on forecasting clearing prices and using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to plan a bidding strategy across multiple time periods. In addition, we present a fast heuristic strategy that can be used either as a standalone method or as an initial set of bids to seed the MCTS policy. We evaluate our bidding strategies using a PDA simulator based on the wholesale market implemented in the Power Trading Agent Competition (PowerTAC) competition. We demonstrate that our strategies outperform state-of-the-art bidding strategies designed for that competition.

Keywords

  • Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Multi-agent Planning
  • Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Multi-agent Learning
  • Machine Learning: Machine Learning
  • Uncertainty in AI: Sequential Decision Making
  • Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Agent-Based Simulation and Emergence
  • Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems
  • Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Game Playing and Machine Learning
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