A two-stage robust model to determine the optimal selling price for a distributed generation-owning retailer

Summary In this paper, a two-stage robust model is presented for the distributed generation (DG)-owning retailer to determine the optimal selling price offered to its clients. Uncertainties on the wholesale market prices and clients' consumption are two major difficulties faced by the retailer. In the proposed framework, the stochastic programming method is addressed in the upper sub-problem to model the price uncertainty and specify the minimum expected cost of providing clients' demand. The retailer's expected profit is calculated based on the minimum cost. In the lower sub-problem, the non-probabilistic information-gap decision theory is proposed to model uncertain demands and determine the robust selling price. Robustness of selling price against the demand variations is evaluated such that the profit associated with this price will be more than an acceptable threshold, which is defined by the retailer. Additionally, the client response to the robust retail price is considered in the presented bilevel model. The proposed framework is formulated for risk-averse and risk-taker retailers. The efficiency and performance of the presented framework are analyzed on the sample DG-owning retailer. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.