AMIRIS: Agent-based Market model for the Investigation of Renewable and Integrated energy Systems

Abstract

AMIRIS is an agent-based model (ABM) to simulate electricity markets. The focus of this bottom-up model is on the business-oriented decisions of actors in the energy system. These actors are represented as prototypical agents in the model, each with own complex decision-making strategies. Inter alia, the bidding decisions are based on the assessment of electricity market prices and generation forecasts (Nitsch, Deissenroth-Uhrig, et al., 2021), and diverse actors deciding on different time scales may be modelled. In particular, the agents' behavior does not only reflect marginal prices, but can also consider effects of support instruments like market premia, uncertainties and limited information, or market power (Frey et al., 2020). This allows assessing which policy or market design is best suited to an economic and effective energy system (Torralba-Díaz et al., 2020). The simulations generate results on the dispatch of power plants and flexibility options, technology-specific market values, development of system costs or CO2 emissions. One important output of the model are simulated market prices (Deissenroth et al., 2017). AMIRIS is developed in Java using the FAME-Core framework (Schimeczek et al., 2023) and is available on Gitlab 1. One important design goal was to make assumptions and calculations as transparent as possible in order to improve reproducibility. AMIRIS was successfully tested on different computer systems, ranging from desktop-PCs to high-performance computing clusters. Statement of need In the field of energy systems analysis, linear optimisation models are the most prevalent type of model (Ringkjøb et al., 2018). They are often used to identify cost-optimal systems. Many linear optimisation models are highly developed, offer a comprehensive set of technologies, cover multiple sectors, and consider constraints of the electricity grid (Prina et al., 2020). However, they assume perfect competition and disregard market imperfections and actor inhomogeneity (Torralba-Díaz et al., 2020). ABMs, in contrast, are clearly a minority in the field of energy systems analysis. However, they are ideally suited to study the interaction and behaviour of heterogeneous actors and can consider market imperfections. We know only of a few mature ABMs in use, namely PowerACE (Genoese, 2011; Keles et al., 2016; Sensfuß, 2008; Weidlich & Veit, 2020), EMLab-1 https://gitlab.com/dlr-ve/esy/amiris/amiris/ Schimeczek et al. (2023). AMIRIS: Agent-based Market model for the Investigation of Renewable and Integrated energy Systems. Journal of Open Source Software, 8(84), 5041. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05041.