Analysing the interactions between the energy markets (Day-Ahead and Intra-day Markets) and the ancillary services markets (Dispatching Service and Balancing Markets) requires consistent integration of existing simulation tools of the individual markets in order to facilitate their cascading inside a common platform.

The integration of these tools, created at different times and by different developers, involves interventions of different nature: in fact, it is necessary to try to standardise as much as possible the ways the users of these tools provide the information needed for simulations, as well as the internal structures of the tools, so as to facilitate corrective and evolutionary maintenance by personnel other than the original developers. With a view to this integration, in the previous year of System Research, specific requirements were identified regarding the characteristics of the common platform, including the need for consistency in the management of simulator input/output data and the discontinuation, where possible, of the use of commercial products such as Matlab.

This report describes some new IT applications that have been specifically created to support the common platform in which to add the electricity system simulators developed in recent years: sMTSIM (Day-Ahead Market simulator) and RUC (Dispatching Service Market and Balancing Market simulator). These applications do not affect the mathematical models of the simulation of the two markets, which remain unchanged, as they radically change the way in which these models acquire their input data and produce their output data, and standardise that which today, sMTSIM and RUC perform in completely different ways.

The report also describes some characteristics of other IT applications to be created in the future in further platform developments, with particular reference to improving the efficiency of the automatic transcoding operations of high-level information, which the sMTSIM user enters in Microsoft format Excel, into detailed information in different formats intended for mathematical models.