A fast market splitting matching method for the spot electric power market

A fast, innovative matching method for the spot power market, considering network constraints, has been developed. In this method, buy and sell order bids are respectively divided into the aggregated volume of several band prices. Then, the aggregated volume and the center of each band price are used to calculate an index band clearing price, which contains the real clearing price. The division and calculation process is iterated until the band price is less than the tick size of the bidding price. This method is applied to a real problem in the Japan power market, with 9 bidding areas, 10 area-connecting lines, and 9000 orders (volume/price pairs). Numerical simulation results show that the new method is ten times faster than conventional linear programming, demonstrating the effectiveness of this method. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 165(4): 21–29, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.20694