The Greek State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) awarded a 500€ prize to our graduate student Mr. Stavros Orfanoudakis, for his key contribution to TUC-TAC’s team distinction in PowerTAC 2021 international competition.
After being crowned the PowerTAC champion in 2020, the TUC-TAC intelligent software agent finished second in the 2021 international PowerTAC trading agents’ competition. Team members included Stavros Orfanoudakis (graduate student) and Associate Professor Georgios Chalkiadakis in a “managerial”, advisory role).
The complete PowerTAC 2021 finals results can be found on the PowerTAC 2021 results page.
This year's qualifiers consisted of 10 teams from around the globe, but only 7 made it to the finals. PowerTAC is held annually, and pits intelligent autonomous software agents corresponding to energy brokers against each other in simulated complex retail electricity markets. The TUC-TAC team, located at the InteLLigence Lab of the School of ECE at the Technical University of Crete, has been developing intelligent software agents to participate in trading agent competitions since 2012.
Specifically, in 2020 TUC-TAC's excellent performance crowned it as PowerTAC’s champion. The PowerTAC's 2021 competition was fierce and another agent was declared the winner. However, TUC-TAC won 29 out of 50 7-player games, 49 out of 90 5-player games, and 61 out of 90 3-player games it took part in.
TUC-TAC employs AI and Machine Learning techniques in order to subscribe a large number of customers (electricity consumers) to its services, while ensuring that it keeps its costs low. TUC-TAC 2021 was a tweaked version of 2020’s agent, specifically updated to perform damage control in some extreme scenarios.
