Physical and economic vulnerabilities of transactive mechanisms

Handing the coordination of a network to distributed agents that negotiate moves risk rather than removing it. To the usual physical failures are added failure modes belonging to the mechanism itself: a participant who learns to play the rules to their advantage, false information that propagates, a communication outage that leaves agents deciding on stale data. The 2021 Texas blackout was a reminder that a technically modern grid can remain vulnerable through the design of its markets.

This project identifies scenarios of physical, economic and cyber vulnerability in the interaction mechanisms, and assesses the performance of the proposed approaches under uncertainty. The aim is not to produce a catalogue of threats but to state, for each mechanism retained in the program, what would have to happen for it to stop working — and what that would cost.

Main objective

Identify scenarios of physical, economic and cyber vulnerability in the interaction mechanisms, and assess the performance of the proposed approaches under uncertainty.

Methodology

Surveying the failure modes specific to transactive mechanisms — physical, economic and cyber; analysing the strategic behaviours liable to divert the market rules; assessing the robustness of the retained mechanisms by simulation under uncertainty and under loss of communication; quantifying the effect of each failure on the service delivered to the grid.