Power TAC Experiment Manager: Support for Empirical Studies

The Power TAC Experiment Manager is a tool that supports empirical research using the Power TAC competitive simulation environment. An “experiment” in this context consists of a set of baseline games that are typically configured to be identical except for the seeds used to generate the various random values used in a simulation, along with a set of treatments. A treatment can be a configuration change in the server, such as the population of distributed solar producers, or a change in configuration of one of the brokers, or a change in the set of brokers competing with each other, or a change in the weather data sequence. The Experiment Manager is designed around the Docker container virtualization engine, simplifying setup and operation and supporting broker designs that are not easily distributed as simple “jar” files. The result is a system that greatly simplifies the process of setting up and running empirical studies that may require running tens to hundreds of multi-hour simulation session, and collecting and processing the resulting flood of large log files.