International Emission Permit Markets with Refunding

We propose a blueprint for an international emission permit market such as the EU trading scheme. Each country decides on the amount of permits it wants to offer. A fraction of these permits is grandfathered, the remainder is auctioned. Revenues from the auction are collected in a global fund and reimbursed to member countries in fixed proportions. We show that international permit markets with refunding lead to outcomes in which all countries tighten the issuance of permits and are better off compared to standard international permit markets. If the share of grandfathered permits is sufficiently small, we obtain approximately socially optimal emission reductions.climate change mitigation, global refunding scheme, international permit markets, international agreements, tradeable permits

Auctioning Airspace

The commercialization of air taxis and autonomous passenger drones will one day congest urban airspace. Operators expect that, once flights are autonomous and the cost of service falls, high-traffic urban “vertiports” could see hundreds of air taxi takeoffs and landings per hour. Low-altitude airspace—between 200 feet and 5,000 feet above ground level—offers a relatively blank slate to explore new regulatory models for air traffic management and avoid command-and-control mistakes made in the past in aviation. Regulators’ current proposals would centralize air taxi traffic management into a single system to coordinate air taxi traffic, but this approach likely creates technology lock-in and unduly benefits the initial operators at the expense of later innovators. To facilitate the development of the air taxi market, regulators should consider demarcating aerial travel corridors and auctioning exclusive-use licenses to operators for use of those corridors, much like regulators auction radio spectrum licenses and offshore wind energy sites. Exclusive rights to routes would allow transfer and sale to more efficient operators and would also give operators the certainty they need to finance the substantial capital investments

Autonomic service configuration for telecommunication MASs with extended role-based GAIA and JADEx

Autonomie Communications have attracted huge attention recently for the management of telecommunication networks in the European Network Research Community. The purpose of this research is to offer the abilities such as autonomy, scalability, adaptation as well as simplicity for management application in complex networks. The accomplished networks inspired by biological mechanisms or market-based concepts could enable agents to be of intelligence, scalablility, and interoperabliliry in the management functional domains with regards to the large volume requirements from services' fulfillment perspective in decentralized Multi-Agent Systems. In accordance with TMF and FIPA specifications and requirements, the autonomy attributes self-configuring, self-adapting, self-limiting, self-preserving, and self-optimizing are involved into our simulation. Resource allocation requests are bidded for a long session in the multi-unit Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction. This design adopts the software development methodology-GAIA and the framework-JADEx. We have shown multiple service configuration in dynamic network can be nearly optimized by autonomie behaviors via bidding according to business objectives for getting maximum revenues. We conclude this end-to-end approach maintains self-managing capability, easy-to-implement scalability, and more incentively compatible and efficient over other common implementation so that it could achieve the optimal solution to the flexible requirements for the Service Fulfillment for advanced IP networks. © 2005 IEEE

Coalition Formation and Combinatorial Auctions; Applications to Self-organization and Self-management in Utility Computing

In this paper we propose a two-stage protocol for resource management in a hierarchically organized cloud. The first stage exploits spatial locality for the formation of coalitions of supply agents; the second stage, a combinatorial auction, is based on a modified proxy-based clock algorithm and has two phases, a clock phase and a proxy phase. The clock phase supports price discovery; in the second phase a proxy conducts multiple rounds of a combinatorial auction for the package of services requested by each client. The protocol strikes a balance between low-cost services for cloud clients and a decent profit for the service providers. We also report the results of an empirical investigation of the combinatorial auction stage of the protocol.Comment: 14 page

Carbon Pricing and the Transition from Voluntary to Mandatory Markets

The current national and global call for a coordinated and meaningful response to climate change concerns is certain to shift the United States from several regional and voluntary carbon markets today to a global compulsory market in the near future. In addition to the clear environmental benefits, this changing landscape will result in groups of carbon market "winners" and "losers" – some market segments will gain favor and market share while others will lose economic opportunity. The competitive disadvantage for traditional energy in a carbon-priced world will be a catalyst for market-driven innovations in renewable energy, and sustainable development. There are many opportunities where Austin and Texas stand to gain as larger carbon pricing components are realized. This primer looks to explore the political, economic, and design considerations that will affect the development of the carbon market.IC2 Institut

Robust and cheating-resilient power auctioning on Resource Constrained Smart Micro-Grids

The principle of Continuous Double Auctioning (CDA) is known to provide an efficient way of matching supply and demand among distributed selfish participants with limited information. However, the literature indicates that the classic CDA algorithms developed for grid-like applications are centralised and insensitive to the processing resources capacity, which poses a hindrance for their application on resource constrained, smart micro-grids (RCSMG). A RCSMG loosely describes a micro-grid with distributed generators and demand controlled by selfish participants with limited information, power storage capacity and low literacy, communicate over an unreliable infrastructure burdened by limited bandwidth and low computational power of devices. In this thesis, we design and evaluate a CDA algorithm for power allocation in a RCSMG. Specifically, we offer the following contributions towards power auctioning on RCSMGs. First, we extend the original CDA scheme to enable decentralised auctioning. We do this by integrating a token-based, mutual-exclusion (MUTEX) distributive primitive, that ensures the CDA operates at a reasonably efficient time and message complexity of O(N) and O(logN) respectively, per critical section invocation (auction market execution). Our CDA algorithm scales better and avoids the single point of failure problem associated with centralised CDAs (which could be used to adversarially provoke a break-down of the grid marketing mechanism). In addition, the decentralised approach in our algorithm can help eliminate privacy and security concerns associated with centralised CDAs. Second, to handle CDA performance issues due to malfunctioning devices on an unreliable network (such as a lossy network), we extend our proposed CDA scheme to ensure robustness to failure. Using node redundancy, we modify the MUTEX protocol supporting our CDA algorithm to handle fail-stop and some Byzantine type faults of sites. This yields a time complexity of O(N), where N is number of cluster-head nodes; and message complexity of O((logN)+W) time, where W is the number of check-pointing messages. These results indicate that it is possible to add fault tolerance to a decentralised CDA, which guarantees continued participation in the auction while retaining reasonable performance overheads. In addition, we propose a decentralised consumption scheduling scheme that complements the auctioning scheme in guaranteeing successful power allocation within the RCSMG. Third, since grid participants are self-interested we must consider the issue of power theft that is provoked when participants cheat. We propose threat models centred on cheating attacks aimed at foiling the extended CDA scheme. More specifically, we focus on the Victim Strategy Downgrade; Collusion by Dynamic Strategy Change, Profiling with Market Prediction; and Strategy Manipulation cheating attacks, which are carried out by internal adversaries (auction participants). Internal adversaries are participants who want to get more benefits but have no interest in provoking a breakdown of the grid. However, their behaviour is dangerous because it could result in a breakdown of the grid. Fourth, to mitigate these cheating attacks, we propose an exception handling (EH) scheme, where sentinel agents use allocative efficiency and message overheads to detect and mitigate cheating forms. Sentinel agents are tasked to monitor trading agents to detect cheating and reprimand the misbehaving participant. Overall, message complexity expected in light demand is O(nLogN). The detection and resolution algorithm is expected to run in linear time complexity O(M). Overall, the main aim of our study is achieved by designing a resilient and cheating-free CDA algorithm that is scalable and performs well on resource constrained micro-grids. With the growing popularity of the CDA and its resource allocation applications, specifically to low resourced micro-grids, this thesis highlights further avenues for future research. First, we intend to extend the decentralised CDA algorithm to allow for participants’ mobile phones to connect (reconnect) at different shared smart meters. Such mobility should guarantee the desired CDA properties, the reliability and adequate security. Secondly, we seek to develop a simulation of the decentralised CDA based on the formal proofs presented in this thesis. Such a simulation platform can be used for future studies that involve decentralised CDAs. Third, we seek to find an optimal and efficient way in which the decentralised CDA and the scheduling algorithm can be integrated and deployed in a low resourced, smart micro-grid. Such an integration is important for system developers interested in exploiting the benefits of the two schemes while maintaining system efficiency. Forth, we aim to improve on the cheating detection and mitigation mechanism by developing an intrusion tolerance protocol. Such a scheme will allow continued auctioning in the presence of cheating attacks while incurring low performance overheads for applicability in a RCSMG