Approximating Energy Market Clearing and Bidding With Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Energy markets can provide incentives for undesired behavior of market participants. Multi-agent Reinforcement learning (MARL) is a promising new approach to predicting the expected behavior of energy market participants. However, reinforcement learning requires many interactions with the system to converge, and the power system environment often consists of extensive computations, e.g., optimal power flow (OPF) calculation for market clearing. To tackle this complexity, we provide a model of the energy market to a basic MARL algorithm in the form of a learned OPF approximation and explicit market rules. The learned OPF surrogate model makes an explicit solving of the OPF completely unnecessary. Our experiments demonstrate that the model additionally reduces training time by about one order of magnitude but at the cost of a slightly worse approximation of the Nash equilibrium. Potential applications of our method are market design, more realistic modeling of market participants, and analysis of manipulative behavior.