IEEMC Call for Papers - IISM

Call for papers
First International E-Energy Market Challenge
http://www.im.uni-karlsruhe.de/ieemc
ieemc@iism.uni-karlsruhe.de
To be held at the
8 th International Conference on
Autonomic Computing and Communications
http://www.cis.fiu.edu/conferences/icac2011/
18th June 2011, Karlsruhe, Germany
UPDATE: There are two separate deadline dates depending on whether or not the authors
want to have their papers published in the context of ICAC proceedings or want to submit
non-copyrighted working paper status papers. We strongly encourage submission of
contributions which are ongoing research in this field.
Non-copyrighted working papers:
Paper submission deadline: March 31, 2011
Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2011
Camera ready paper: May 15, 2011
ICAC proceedings papers:
Paper submission deadline: February 28, 2011
Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2011
Camera ready paper: April 4, 2011
Workshop Date: June 18, 2011
Introduction
Today's power grid control and dispatch strategies mainly rely on centralized control centres that
manage a limited number of large power plants such that their output meets the fluctuating energy
demands in real time. The need for a transition to renewable energy sources leads to a quickly
increasing share of small energy generators with intermittent generation timelines. In combination
with smart energy consumers that change their demand patterns over time, the purely centralized
approach to power grid control becomes more and more difficult to maintain. Hence, a more
flexible, decentralized, and self-organizing control infrastructure must be developed that can be
actively managed to balance both the large grid as a whole, as well as the many lower voltage subgrids
with its many small energy generators (e.g. photovoltaic installations or combined-heat-andpower
combustion engines). Depending on the granularity and the time frame of the traded power
products, there will be a strong need for agents acting autonomously on behalf of their stakeholders.
The clever use of concepts from autonomic and organic computing as well as from multi-agent
systems and from economics will be essential for succeeding in the competition.

One candidate for such a new control infrastructure is an energy market at the retail level, i.e. at the
level of currently completely passive and unmanaged (low-voltage) distribution grids. To help
mitigate the risk of instituting such markets in the real world, agent-based simulations of such
markets can provide important insights. Workshop participants are thus invited to join in to a
program of economic modelling and laboratory experimentation to understand and experiment with
retail energy market design along with the performance of their own autonomous agents in a
competitive simulation environment.
Topics of interest
The workshop focuses on the design, realization and evaluation simulations agents of the workshop
participants. We are especially interested in novel decision-making algorithms, game-theoretic
models and analyses, innovative technical agent as well as machine learning frameworks in the
context of multi-agent settings within the energy domain.
Retail level energy markets have a huge potential to meet the challenges which the structural
change towards renewable, intermittent energy generators poses to electricity networks all over the
world. At the same time such local markets are characterized by a multitude of different actors such
as households, electric vehicle owners or commercial customers. Conventional optimization
techniques such (e.g. dynamic programming) are hardly implementable within such diverse and
complex systems. In contrast competitive market simulations thrive within such settings and thus
offer a way to design and test retail energy markets prior to a real world implementation.
We, moreover, want to present and discuss a competitive testbed environment for agent-based
simulations along the lines of the well-established trading agent competitions. This trading agent
competition for energy markets (Power TAC) is supposed to facilitate research and development of
appropriate retail energy market structures along with corresponding software agents that can
support or even automate decision making in these markets. This environment will model a marketbased
management structure for local and regional energy networks at multiple levels of
complexity. It will closely model reality by using real historic data on energy production and
consumption, weather, and consumer preferences. A more detailed description of the competition is
available online at powertac.org. We hope to run a live competition at the workshop.
Submissions and further information
We are interested in both theoretical as well as implementation-oriented papers on agent-based
simulation systems for energy markets. Papers should be around 10 pages including the text, figures
and references.
Papers must be formatted according to the ACM proceedings format and can be submitted via the
EasyChair submission system:
https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=ieemc11
Further instructions for submissions are available on the website.
The workshop is co-located with the 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Autonomic
Computing (ICAC). ICAC2011 will be held in Karlsruhe, Germany from the 14th-18th of June. The
IEEMC workshop will be held on the 18 th of June.
For any questions, send your email to: ieemc@iism.uni-karlsruhe.de

Organizing committee
Christof Weinhardt, KIT
Wolfgang Ketter, RSM
Lilia Filipova-Neumann, FZI
Anke Weidlich, SAP Research
Program committee
Carsten Block, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
John Collins, University of Minnesota
Hellmuth Frey, EnBW
Christoph Flath, FZI
Steven Kimbrough, Wharton School of Business
Marco Kuhrmann, Technical University of Munich
Steffen Lamparter, Siemens
Sebastian Lehnhoff, University of Oldenburg, OFFIS
Detlev Schumann, IBM
Orestis Terzidis, SAP Research
Clemens van Dinther, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Harald Vogt, SAP Research