Getting Started

Using the new Java/Spring server

The Power TAC server is designed to be installed and run using maven, a tool that provides a rich dependency-management infrastructure as well as goal-directed build automation. If you do not have a copy of maven on your system, you will need to install it. Although it is not absolutely necessary, we recommend that you build your brokers as maven projects as well, or using some other tool that uses maven repositories, such as Gradle.

The server is distributed in the form of a small directory that contains a README.txt file, a sample server configuration file, and a maven "project object model" file called pom.xml. The first time you run the server, there will be a significant pause, and considerable console output, while maven retrieves all the components that make up the server. Detailed instructions for configuring and running the server are in the README.txt file.

For more information on the status, design, and development process for the server, there is a developer-oriented writeup at GitHub on getting started with the new Power TAC server.

Release notes for Power TAC server version 0.1.0, December 2011

This release is a "developers" release. The simulator portion of the Power TAC server is quite usable, but missing a few features that we intend to support for the 2012 competition in June. However, the web-based front-end is missing, the web application for scheduling tournaments and large-scale experiments is not included, and there are as yet no log-analysis tools available.

Specific unresolved issues for this release include (with links to the original github issues)

• We currently do not have a Java-based broker framework to offer (issue #444), although we expect to have one in a few weeks, and there are a couple of people who have already done Java-based brokers. There is also a Grails-based broker framework that has been updated to work with the new server.
• Some modules are not currently configurable through the server properties file (issues #419 and #454.
• Customer models, including the solar and wind models in the factored-customer module, do not react to current weather conditions (issue #441).
• The balancing charges are not generated exactly as described in the specification (issue #435). Instead, the older balancing scheme from the Grails prototype is still in place.
• An anomaly has been observed in wholesale market clearing (issue #457), in a forked version of the server. At this point we have not been able to make it happen in the current codebase, but we are leaving the issue open until we are confident that it's been resolved.
• Brokers do not get information about total net load per timeslot (issue #431).
• Cloud cover in weather reports is always zero (issue #308).
• Customer models currently do not implement controllable/interruptible capacity, and the distribution utility does not exercise them in any case (issue #243).

Using the Grails Prototype

Instructions for the original Grails version of the Power TAC simulation server.