Automated negotiation plays a crucial role in the decision support for bilateral energy transactions. In fact, an adequate analysis of past actions of opposing negotiators can improve the decision-making process of market players, allowing them to choose the most appropriate parties to negotiate with in order to increase their outcomes. This paper proposes a new model to estimate the expected prices that can be achieved in bilateral contracts under a specific context, enabling adequate risk management in the negotiation process. The proposed approach is based on an adaptation of the Q-Learning reinforcement learning algorithm to choose the best scenario (set of forecast contract prices) from a set of possible scenarios that are determined using several forecasting and estimation methods. The learning process assesses the probability of occurrence of each scenario, by comparing each expected scenario with the real scenario. The final chosen scenario is the one that presents the higher expected utility value. Besides, the learning method can determine which is the best scenario for each context, since the behaviour of players can change according to the negotiation environment. Consequently, these conditions influence the final contract price of negotiations. This approach allows the supported player to be prepared for the negotiation scenario that is the most probable to represent a reliable approximation of the actual negotiation environment.
The electricity markets restructuring process encouraged the use of computational tools in order to allow the study of different market mechanisms and the relationships between the participating entities. Automated negotiation plays a crucial role in the decision support for energy transactions due to the constant need for players to engage in bilateral negotiations. This paper proposes a methodology to estimate bilateral contract prices, which is essential to support market players in their decisions, enabling adequate risk management of the negotiation process. The proposed approach uses an adaptation of the Q-Learning reinforcement learning algorithm to choose the best from a set of possible contract prices forecasts that are determined using several methods, such as artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), among others. The learning process assesses the probability of success of each forecasting method, by comparing the expected negotiation price with the historic data contracts of competitor players. The negotiation scenario identified as the most probable scenario that the player will face during the negotiation process is the one that presents the higher expected utility value. This approach allows the supported player to be prepared for the negotiation scenario that is the most likely to represent a reliable approximation of the actual negotiation environment.
The negotiation is one of the most important phase of the process of buying and selling energy in electricity markets. Buyers and sellers know about their own trading behavior or the quality of their products. However, they can also gather data directly or indirectly from them through the exchange information before or during negotiation, even negotiators should also gather information about past behavior of the other parties, such as their trustworthiness and reputation. Hence, in this scope, reputation models play a more important role in decision-making process in the undertaken bilateral negotiation. Since the decision takes into account, not only the potential economic gain for supported player, but also the reliability of the contracts. Therefore, the reputation component represents the level of confidence that the supported player can have on the opponent's service, i.e. in this case, the level of assurance that the opponent will fulfil the conditions established in the contract. This paper proposes a reputation computational model, included in DECON, a decision support system for bilateral contract negotiation, in order to enhance the decision-making process regarding the choice of the most suitable negotiation parties.
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