Competitive electricity markets: simulation to improve decision making

Electricity markets are experiencing a deep restructuring process leading, all over the world, to an open and competitive market to which electricity companies were not used. The importance of the electricity industry in society imposes this process to be taken without a decrease in power system reliability. In this paper, the authors present the most important aspects of the electricity markets restructuring process and relates their work concerning the development of an electricity market simulation environment. This environment is based on a multi-agent architecture, which is very suitable for this situation. The use of this tool can be of great help for all the entities acting in the electricity markets, such as producers, distributors and regulators. These entities can use this tool to evaluate the consequences of their decisions before they have to be taken in the real market.