Integrated software platform to teach different electricity spot market architectures

Electricity spot market architectures have rapidly evolved; their understanding, behavior, and redesign can be guided with the help of integrated simulation platforms. This paper presents a software platform for the integrated short-term simulation of different energy spot market architectures. The simulator considers three different architectures: i) decentralized spot markets (the separated market and system operator approach), ii) centralized spot markets (whose basis is a unit commitment model for competition in the generation side), and iii) hybrid spot market architectures (that operate under a single operator and avoid unit-commitment complexities including demand response and bilateral contracts). The software platform integrates tools for data management and display as well as available solvers for mathematical programming problems. The platform is intended and has successfully been used to teach electricity market courses at undergraduate and graduate levels at Morelia Institute of Technology in Mexico, and also in several special diploma programs on electricity markets to more than a hundred engineers from the national energy control center and the energy regulatory commission in Mexico as well as five different system/market operators of the central American countries.