December 2022

Team VidyutVanika (VV) continued its dominance in the international smart grid competition PowerTAC by winning the tournament for the second consecutive time. Team VidyutVanika is a collaboration between the Machine Learning Lab (MLL) of IIIT Hyderabad and TCS Innovation Labs since November 2016 that designs an autonomous

broker agent named VidyutVanika for a smart grid simulation platform Power Trading Agent Competition (PowerTAC). Since the start, the core team has remained the same: Dr. Praveen Paruchuri and Dr. Sujit Gujar from IIITH, Dr. Easwar Subramanian and Dr. Sanjay Bhat from TCS. The lead student from IIITH, Sanjay Chandlekar, has been working with the team since 2020. PowerTAC organizes an annual tournament in which teams participate across the globe by deploying their broker agents; the broker VidyutVanika remains the sole Indian entry in the tournament. This year’s tournament (PowerTAC2022) included the top 5 brokers from previous tournaments. Despite the strong competition, the broker VidyutVanika22 emerged as the winner with a normalized score 75% higher than the runner-up’s score and became the only second broker to win the PowerTAC tournament in two consecutive years. The broker VidyutVanika22 is a fine-tuned version of VidyutVanika21 that demonstrated an impressive performance in the PowerTAC2021 tournament. This year’s victory marks the end of the PowerTAC tournaments too. Sanjay Chandlekar has also made significant contributions to VidyutVanika’s success, with papers published at AAMAS’22 and IJCAI’22 that deal with research pertaining to smart grids and the contributions are validated on PowerTAC.