Ž . Decision Support Systems 28 2000 279–290 www.elsevier.comrlocaterdsw Multi-agent approach to the planning of power transmission expansion Jerome Yen a, ) , Yonghe Yan b , Javier Contreras c , Pai-Chun Ma d , Felix F. Wu e a Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, Chinese UniÕersity of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, People’s Republic of China b Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, The UniÕersity of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, People’s Republic of China c Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales, UniÕersidad de Castilla — La Mancha, Campus UniÕersitario s r n, 13071 Ciudad Real, Spain d Department of Computer Information Systems, Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City UniÕersity of New York, New York, NY, USA e Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, UniÕersity of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, People’s Republic of China Abstract Deregulation and restructuring have become unavoidable trends to the power industry recently in order to increase its efficiency, to reduce operation costs, or to provide customers better services. The once centralized system planning and management must be remodeled to reflect the changes in the market environment. We have proposed and developed a multi-agent-based system to assist players, such as owners of power generation stations, owners of transmission lines, and groups of consumers, in the same market to select partners to form coalitions. The system provides users with a cooperation plan and its associated cost allocation plan for the users to support their decision-making process. Bilateral Shapley Value Ž . BSV was selected as the theoretical foundation to develop the system. The multi-agent system was developed by the w combination of IDEAS M. Klusch, Utilitarian coalition formation between autonomous agents for cooperative information Ž . x gathering, in: S. Krin, G. O’hare Eds. , Cooperative Knowledge Processing. Springer, London, 1996 and TclrTk. q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Software agent; Intelligent agent; Bilateral Shapley Value; Cooperative game theory 1. Introduction Since the late 1980s, electric utility industry has been facing the pressure of deregulation and restruc- turing. Two of the major changes were that the ) Corresponding author. Ž . E-mail address: jyen@se.cuhk.edu.hk J. Yen . owners of the transmission lines could participate in the market to make decision on behalf of themselves and that the old boundary lines have been removed to offer consumers more alternatives, for example, consumers were allowed to purchase electricity from the power stations located in other states. As deregulation and restructuring have become inevitable trends in the modern utility industries, there is a need for more efficient methods or systems to facilitate a just and stable searching for new 0167-9236r00r$ - see front matter q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Ž . PII: S0167-9236 99 00092-5