An E - Market System for Electric Utilities

iii ABSTRACT Multi-Agent Systems play a very important role in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Many multi-agent systems have been built to represent a variety of social structures, such as teams (formed by a team leader recruiting qualified members for problem solving), alliances (temporary groups formed by agents with similar goal structures), coalitions (similar to alliances except the members do not abandon their individual goals but engage only in those joint activities whose goals are not in conflict with their own), conventions (a description of forbidden or preferred goals or actions) and markets (consisting of buyers and sellers and mechanisms for transacting business); however, there has been no unifying structure to guide the development of these systems and to help in the transfer of expertise between DAI researchers. The main objective of this thesis is to define a structure called a " market " that can be reused in other market-based multi-agent systems. To achieve this objective, different models of a market-based multi-agent system modeling a deregulated electricity market were implemented. Experiments were conducted on the models to determine the type of market structure best suited for trading. iv Dedicated to my family v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS