Scope
Electricity is probably the most important infrastructural element of the economy of each nation and is central to the welfare of modern societies. In the last decade the Electricity Industry all over the world moved from a central operated structure, characterized by a regulated Monopoly and a Vertical Integrated Utility, to a distributed decision making structure with the introduction of competitive markets with competition among the suppliers and the demanders of electricity.
Electricity markets, unlike other commodity and good markets, need to be operated under very strict and rather difficult-to-control physical, technical and operational constraints (instantaneous power balance without storage possibilities, grid-structure depended power flows, voltage and reactive power control, stability and security requirements).
The new competitive dimension of the electric industry poses new challenges to the technical design and the operation of power systems, from one side, and, from the other, the physical constraints may pose boundaries to the efficient economic operation of the market. This interaction between the “physical†and the “economic†layer is absolutely specific of this context and need to be properly addressed, providing a mixed background in which both the economic and engineering aspects along with the interrelationships need to be considered. Moreover, the market context, characterized by a large number of market players interacting in different ways on a physical network that provides limitation and wide impacts both on the interactions and on the final efficiency of the market, defines a typical complex scenarios in which the traditional analytical approaches fail in modeling the market and its performance; approaches and models based on Game Theory (GT) and Complexity Theories, such as Multi Agent Systems (MAS) and Complex Networks (CN), provide a sound environment for the simulation and assessment of competitive electricity markets.
The Summer School aims to propose a joint training activity, in the area of electricity markets, to be undertaken jointly by Politecnico di Torino (PdT), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), and The University of Hong Kong (UHK). The School in organized in the framework of the “Italy–China–India Triangular Internationalization Project†supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research and is a part of the Joint Doctoral Program in Electrical Engineering between PdT and SJTU and the European projects GIACS and ONCE-CS.
