On February 29, 2016, FERC issued a notice of a technical conference to be held at FERC’s headquarters on June 27, 28, and 29, 2016 to discuss opportunities for increasing real-time and day-ahead market efficiency through improved software. The notice indicates a detailed agenda will be posted on FERC’s website after April 22, 2016.

FERC’s notice states that the technical conference will cover several topics, including: (1) improvements to the representation of physical constraints that are either not currently modeled or currently modeled using mathematical approximations; (2) consideration of uncertainty to better maximize expected market surplus; (3) improvements to the ability to identify and use flexibility in the existing systems; (4) improvements to the duality interpretations of the economic dispatch model, with the goal of enabling the calculations of prices which represent better equilibrium and are more incentive-compatible; and (5) other improvements in algorithms, model formulations, or hardware that may allow for increases in market efficiency.

Speaker nominations for the technical conference are due on or before April 8, 2016. Following the conference, FERC will accept comments until July 31, 2016.

A copy of FERC’s notice can be found here.