i-COMET™ Integrated Hardware/Software Solution for Day-Ahead Markets

i-COMET™ is a full featured web-based integrated hardware/software solution that administers day-ahead energy markets (DAMs). Market participants enter, review, and submit bid/offer data for forward energy and operating reserves, while market operators oversee the creation of network/generation models-facilitating the submission of bids/offers, executing the security constrained unit commitment (SCUC) calculation on one or more cases, and approving the results. The principal outcomes of the DAM are to:

• Issue binding forward contracts to generators and loads
• Allow for bilateral transaction scheduling concurrently with generation supply and load bids
• Conduct a security constrained unit commitment calculation that clears the schedules for the DAM. In this market, the SCUC scheduling software co-optimizes forward financial energy transactions and reserve ancillary service bids for least-cost solution
• Compute hourly locational marginal prices (LMPs)

Key features include:

• Fully integrated web-based system that monitors and manages the daily co-optimized DAM for ancillary service capacity and forward financial energy transactions
• Nexant's COMET-based optimization technology for the SCUC process, which incorporates advanced modeling features required for clearing energy and operating reserves markets in a fair and efficient manner
• Integration of all necessary DAM components including:
• Market user interface (MUI). This is a web-based, secure user interface that allows market participants to enter, upload, and review data and results of a DAM. This interface also allows the participants to review public or private messages from the market operations staff
• Market operator interface (MOI). This subsystem is the main user interface for the market operator staff. It is also web-based and is accessed via a secure intranet. It allows operators to interact with the market model, view and edit market participant registration, run reports, manage the database, validate input data, and perform any other function necessary to produce satisfactory results for the DAM
• Database (DB). This subsystem manages all data access to both public and private data. The database subsystem is designed to meet the volume, security and performance requirements for the DAM
• Calculation engine (SCUC). This subsystem performs SCUC calculations, which means that it determines the optimal generation unit commitment and dispatch, taking into consideration transmission security constraints, fuel allocation limits, and emission allowances. The result is a set of schedules and prices for generating resources with minimum operating costs while satisfying a set of operation constraints over the next 24 hours
• Data interface subsystem. A flexible data interface subsystem that permits the integration of this system with other market systems in a variety of ways
• Open, flexible architecture, with SOA-ready components, to interface with existing market systems to meet specific IT infrastructure requirements
• Security services consisting of a set of well-defined mechanisms and policies (related to authentication, role identification and authorization) that allow users to access defined resources in the system
• Scalability-state-of-the art J2EE architecture with high-performance database and scalable application servers to scale the solution as the number of market participants/bids/network footprint increase