Wholesale power trading through concurrent multiple-issue negotiation

The electricity trade is expensive, and requires substantial expertise and efficient co-ordination methodologies. Several trading mechanisms including auctions have been adopted in the current energy market. To pursue success in this market, we present a protocol to support many-to-many bilateral multiple-issue negotiation in a competitive market where one or more self-interested electricity sellers can provide electricity to one or more buyers while buyers can choose the preferred sellers. Negotiation is a technique for reaching mutually beneficial agreement among autonomous entities. A concurrent negotiation problem occurs when one entity needs to negotiate simultaneously with several other entities to reach agreement. In the context of wholesale electricity trading, our described protocol enables both electricity buyers and sellers to manage several negotiation processes in parallel. This protocol allows the negotiating participants to make durable commitments to reduce the occurrence of the decommitment situation. Since coloured Petri nets are intuitive and can represent concurrency graphically, we use them to represent our negotiation protocol and facilitate our analysis of desirable properties.