On the Solution of a Bilevel Electricity Market Optimization Problem

This paper studies the static economic optimization problem with a single aggregator and multiple prosumers in a Real-Time Balancing Market (RTBM). We model this problem as a bilevel optimization problem. The state-of-the-art approach to solve a bilevel optimization problem is to reformulate it as a Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP). We propose a convex equivalent optimization problem for the original bilevel one and prove that the global optimum of the prosumers/aggregator bilevel problem can be found by solving the convex problem. Also, we demonstrate the efficiency of our convex equivalent with respect to the MIP formulation in terms of computation time and optimality by means of simulations.