Information Flow in Multi-Agent Deregulated Electricity Market using Social Network Analysis

Electric industries around the world are undergoing unprecedented changes related to deregulation to improve the efficiency of electricity markets. Deregulated electricity markets operate through the cooperative behavior of many interactive agents which exchange and share information during interactions for the accomplishments of tasks and resource allocation problems. What is not known is what kind of information exchange occurs during interaction. How is information being exchange and with whom. The information exchange ties can be represented as a social network. In this paper we proposed a combination of several measures based on social network analysis to analyze multi-agent´s interaction in terms of information exchange. We then use these measures to evaluate information flow in the proposed Nigerian deregulated electricity market coordination mechanism.