A simulation tool for evaluating technical and economical issues in the deregulated electric power industry

All over the world, the restructuring of the electric energy industry is intended to promote economic efficiency while maintaining system security and service quality. The structure of the market (the freedom of the market agents and the constraints their action is bound) determine the success or the failure in achieving these objectives. Many different solutions have been proposed and adopted, and the debate on the best structure is lively, fueled also by the flaws some adopted structures have shown. It is apparent that any proposed market structure, besides its scientific merit, has to be supported by intensive simulation, to highlight both the technical and the economical aspects of the operation In this paper, a software tool useful to model and evaluate market structures is presented; it is based on the object oriented paradigm, and then it is flexible, expandable, modular. The structure of the simulator focuses on the market agents, treated separately from each other with different software modules. The interaction of the various agents can be modeled in detail, due to the adoption of a software platform conceived for the real world communication networks