Metalearning to support competitive electricity market players' strategic bidding

Electricity markets are becoming more competitive, to some extent due to the increasing number of players that have moved from other sectors to the power industry. This is essentially resulting from incentives provided to distributed generation. Relevant changes in this domain are still occurring, such as the extension of national and regional markets to continental scales. Decision support tools have thereby become essential to help electricity market players in their negotiation process. This paper presents a metalearner to support electricity market players in bidding definition. The proposed metalearner uses a dynamic artificial neural network to create its own output, taking advantage on several learning algorithms already implemented in ALBidS (Adaptive Learning strategic Bidding System). The proposed metalearner considers different weights for each strategy, based on their individual performance. The metalearner's performance is analysed in scenarios based on real electricity markets data using MASCEM (Multi-Agent Simulator for Competitive Electricity Markets). Results show that the proposed metalearner is able to provide higher profits to market players when compared to other current methodologies and that results improve over time, as consequence of its learning process. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.