Evolutionary Algorithms for Finding Nash Equilibria in Electricity Markets

Determining the Nash equilibria (NEs) in a competitive electricity market is a challenging economic game problem. Although finding one equilibrium has been well studied, detecting multiple ones is more practical and difficult, with a few attempts to solve such discrete game problems. However, most of the real-life game problems, such an energy market is a continuous one containing infinite sets of strategy that can be adopted by each player. Therefore, in this paper, a co-evolutionary approach is proposed for detecting multiple NEs in a single run involving continuous games among N-players. Five standard test functions and three IEEE energy market problems in three different scenarios are solved, and their results are compared with those obtained from state-of-the-art algorithms. The results clearly show the benefits of the proposed approach in terms of both the quality of solutions and efficiency.