Applications of Bilevel Optimization in Energy and Electricity Markets

Ever since the beginning of the liberalization process of the energy sector and the arrival of electricity markets, decision making has gone away from centralized planners and has become the responsibility of many different entities such as market operators, private generation companies, transmission system operators and many more. The interaction and sequence in which these entities make decisions in liberalized market frameworks have led to a renaissance of Stackelberg-type games referred to as bilevel problems, which capture the natural hierarchy in many decision-making processes in power systems. This chapter aims at demonstrating the crucial insights that such models can provide, and at providing a broad overview of the plethora of the applications of bilevel programming in energy and electricity markets. Finally, a numerical example is included for illustrative purposes.