Market data analysis and short-term price forecasting in the Iran electricity market with pay-as-bid payment mechanism

Market data analysis and short-term price forecasting in Iran electricity market as a market with pay-as-bid payment mechanism has been considered in this paper. The data analysis procedure includes both correlation and predictability analysis of the most important load and price indices. The employed data are the experimental time series from Iran electricity market in its real size and is long enough to make it possible to take properties such as non-stationarity of market into account. For predictability analysis, the bifurcation diagrams and recurrence plots of the data have been investigated. The results of these analyses indicate existence of deterministic chaos in addition to non-stationarity property of the system which implies short-term predictability. In the next step, two artificial neural networks have been developed for forecasting the two price indices in Iran's electricity market. The models’ input sets are selected regarding four aspects: the correlation properties of the available data, the critiques of Iran's electricity market, a proper convergence rate in case of sudden variations in the market price behavior, and the omission of cumulative forecasting errors. The simulation results based on experimental data from Iran electricity market are representative of good performance of the developed neural networks in coping with and forecasting of the market behavior, even in the case of severe volatility in the market price indices.