A three-stage strategy for optimal price offering by a retailer based on clustering techniques

In this paper, an innovative strategy for optimal price offering to customers for maximizing the profit of a retailer is proposed. This strategy is based on load profile clustering techniques and includes three stages. For the purpose of clustering, an improved weighted fuzzy average K-means is proposed. Also, in this paper a new acceptance function for increasing the profit of the retailer is proposed. The new method is evaluated by implementation on a group of 300 customers of a 20 kV distribution network.